Re:Source of creation, or evolution?
on
The Los Alamos Bug
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You really need to look no further than the virus. It is little more than a small bit of DNA or RNA and a protective coating. They generally are parasites on cells since they don't have some of the machinery to reproduce on their own, but as you can tell from the epidemics and pandemics they cause they are a quite successful form of life at its most elemental level.
One things people who fall for intelligent design refuse to appreciate is that life has had hundreds of millions of years to evolve and perfect itself. We can't get our heads around that but that is an enormous number of cycles of mutation and natural selection that would inevitably lead to great diversity and complexity over time. Living organisms have to work because if they don't they die. All the failed mutations are dead, we only see the ones that worked so we are amazed life works but if it didn't we wouldn't be here to judge.
You would be really hard pressed to explain why an intelligent omnipotent being would have made all the design mistakes that we carry with. For example why would an intelligent designer give us an appendix that frequently threatens to kill us.
"and they dispute that such a thing could have evolved out of less complex parts."
So where did their creator and intelligent designer come from then? I think I could visualize random interactions of molecules leading to life better than I could that there is some omnipotent intelligence that has existed for eternity or whom just popped in to existence one day. That is at least as far fetched as amino acids randomly assembling themselves in to a virus or proto cell.
"With our increasing knowledge of the mechanics of life, it's a matter of time until somebody succeeds in creating life from scratch."
Probably, but I doubt it will be in a U.S. government funded lab. As soon as the religious fundamentalists, who once again dominate the U.S., figure out government scientists are trying to create life without God or screwing this will get shut down. Not sure that would be a bad thing in this case.
We know just enough about biology and nanotechnology at this point to be really dangerous sometimes. We can do a lot of wonderful things with drugs and biochemistry but we also manage to create a string of unintended consequences and side effects. We create antibiotics to eliminate the scourge of infections but we create superbugs that are increasingly immune to everything. We create Vioxx to ease arthritis but it ends up causing heart attacks and strokes. And the most insidious unintended consequence of our advance in medicine, most people don't appreciate, we have extended our life spans, if you have the money, to the point that we live much longer than we should, we have people living a poor quality of life for decades in their 80's and 90's draining societies resources, and worse we are producing an exploding population. I'm not sure near technology synthesized immortality is such a great thing. There is benefit in the renewal that comes with the old dieing and letting young, fresh people take over.
Nice rant. I'd be inclined to agree that the environmental extremist are... well... extremists. Of course so are of the free marketeer, I want to make my millions, everyone else be damned, capitalist extremists. Extremists are extremists, and there are extremists occupying every idealogical niche.
Marine mammals evoke a lot of sympathy from environmentalists because they are mammals like us and they have language like us and they have big brains like us. We also hunted many of their families to extinction. The Right Whale got its name because it was the "right" whale for harpooning because its body weight was 40% blubber so they floated well when harpooned, and they produced rich quantities of whale oil. Whale oil was used in lamps and candle wax, it was one of our early forms of energy before we switched to fossil fuel addiction.
Me I'm quite fond of technology and all but the key problem I see with humans and our planet, isn't so much what we do on and to our planet, the main problem is there are simply getting to be to many of us. We are quickly filling every habitable corner of the planet and we are crowding out every other life form on the planet.
We are, for example, mowing down the rain forests at an astonishing rate. Blairo Maggi the governor of Mato Grosso in the heart of the Amazon in Brazil, who is responsible for the oversight of the rain forests there, also happens to be one of the world's largest soy bean producers, he is known as "Rei de Soja" the King of Soya. He is an extremist too, except instead of being an environmental extremist he is a capitalist extremist, he wants to mow down the Amazon's rain forest for lumber and to clear land for soy fields and cattle ranches to enrich himself and the other large land owners in his province. A small number of people will be enriched, and the world will lose one of its last great ecological treasures.
The main problem we have with technology is we've used it to eliminate many of the natural mechanisms for keeping population in check. We have eliminated a lot of disease so our life spans are longer. We've used technology to increase food production both on land and from the sea to push back starvation. End result is we have population explosion.
We could use technology to expand birth control and family planning to compensate but unfortunately religion, Catholicism and Islam in particular are working to frustrate birth control. Unfortunately organized religions have for millenia been designed to value increasing the size of their flock, because numbers were how they gained power and wealth.
So what do we have technology and religion both working to fuel massive population growth. We can no doubt sustain it for a while longer, maybe even until after we are all dead, but at some point the earth is going to crash. We are going to run out of some vital resources, for example, fossil fuels, fresh water, or food and there is going to be an ugly population crash. Another possibility is nature will regain a foothold and a global pandemic will restore the basic laws of population control to humans.
Bottomline is I guess I'm saying technology is all well and good as long as we learn to be responsible members of the ecosphere because at present we are not. The simplest step toward that goal would be to:
A - Make contraceptives universally available B - Hit major religions with a clue bat, the pope and Christian fundamentalists in particular, and point out to them that continuing to frustrate birth contol will eventually and inevitably destroy our species and our planet.
Of course it would have been cheaper still to not have sent them to a place like Iraq in the first place, a couple thousand Americans wouldn't be dead now, and thousands more wouldn't be burned or missing limbs. The problem with the calculus you are engaged in is you could always spend a few more billion and make the soldiers just a little safer, or hey build robotic soldiers and let the soldiers sit at their base playing Halo but in real life. Problem is it would bankrupt the U.S..... oh wait. Military spending is great when it produces technology that can be spun off to peaceful uses, otherwise its a giant hole in the ground and the U.S. is pouring money in to that hole at a furious pace while the rest of the U.S. economy is in near collapse thanks to China (reference a $700 billion trade deficit and a current account deficit approachign a trillion). The U.S. as a whole is doing the same thing to many American's do now, staying prosperous using charge cards, which is a practice that eventually ends in bankruptcy.
Military spending has only two forms of economic value:
A. You need enough to dissuade another power from attacking you, the U.S. has both more than enough to do that, and will never have enough to stop insurgent attacks
B. You use your military power to invade and intimidate other countries to acquire control of their economic assets, oil for instance. The U.S. increasingly seems to being doing that, the only flaw is when it reaches the point of invastion the occupations are costing vastly more than any economic benefit and insurgent attacks have decimated things like Iraqi oil production, so there was little economic benefit from the increasing fondness of the U.S. for aggressive warfare.... except for all the contractors who are making windfall profits on war profiteering, something that has been a hallmark and prime motivator of wars since the dawn of civilization.
As an aside if you've been following the Judith Miller case, the reporter for the New York Times, its starting to look like she was a propaganda tool of Dick Cheney's office who went to extraordinary lengths to whip up WMD fears about Iraq at the behest of the White House while posing as a journalist with supposed integrity, independence and dedication to the truth. It kind of appears the White House manipulated the supposedly free press in to fabricating and propagandizing their case for a war based on lies.
An illuminating anecdote I saw on the news yesterday. The CEO of Delphi, the car parts company that just declared bankruptcy was on stage ranting about turning his failed company around. He had three solutions:
- Move all his manufacturing to China or some other dirt cheap place which they'd already started doing a year or more ago
- Compell their American workers to take a 63% pay cut.
- Increase compensation for the executive and management team. The executive of a bankrupt company are a hot commodity with head hunters and so he needed to shower money on his executives while they destroy their American workers.
Thanks to the intentional demolition of trade barriers, cheap container shipping, cheap telecom and intentional support for illegal immigration, we have, thanks to politicians and business leaders, entered in to a delightful world where wages for working people will be globally pushed down to a small fraction of the wage rates in the U.S. and Western Europe today. Will cost of living and cost of housing also go down, probably not or at least not nearly as much. Chances are we are going to see exploding poverty, unemployment and homelessness in the U.S. and Western Europe.
But if you have wealth and capital, or are in the top ranks of management and are able to exploit cheap labor rates and globalization you can get very rich and continue to live very well.
"Excessive use of the Internet, on the other hand, could lead to independent thought, social instability, and rebellion."
Or it leads to playing WoW all day every day and you turn in to a vegetable. You will also do anything the state demands of you as long as they provide high internet access and long stretches of uninterrupted game time.
If you've player WoW lately you know that it is increasingly being overrun by Chinese, many of whom are making a living off it farming and reselling gold on assorted web sites. You now frequently get spammed with whispered ads for these sites, like gmworker.com.
I wouldn't be surprised if the formerly Communist, now Fascist Party, of China is putting all of their less useful citizens in front of WoW and making them farm all day as a way to transfer dollars from the pockets of western teens in to China's GDP.
"Sure, it costs money, and hassle...everything does. Especially when you want to do something right."
As tight as the margins are in this market now, as low as the volume is, and expensive the R&D costs, it really is hard to build these things from scratch any more and break even, unless maybe you do it in India or China where the labor is dirt cheap. Canada is some cheaper, but not enough. The talent is sparse in this field and you already have to assemble it from all over the world. The western talent isn't likely to take a massive pay cut and end up in India or China.
It was easier to do back when you could charge $30-40k a seat and there was less competition.
"I think that Maya will get axed and the Maya engineers will do some minor stuff in 3dsmax v.10."
Well in thinking about it I've moved to the position that its a 50/50 toss up which one gets axed. I really doubt both will continue on as they are. I just don't have enough insight in the market position of the two, or how the politics will play out. When Autodesk bought Discrete it kind of looks like Discrete won out since everything ended up in Montreal. The Max team might not have enough of a position to come out the winner at this point.
Its possible Discrete has enough of a dislike for Alias the company they will gut it, move all the developers they can to Montreal but make Maya their flagship.
"especially in the lucrative and prestigious movie segment"
The movie segment is "prestigious", I doubt its lucrative. It was when back in the day when they were paying $30-40K a seat, and paying through the nose for maintenance. When you are selling software for $2-3K I wager the movie studios are break even at best for the software companies. You do want them because they help drive ideas for product development but the stuff they want might not have much relation to what the mass market wants. Mostly you just want them because wannabe animators want to use what the studios use, or actually they have to learn it if they want to get a job there someday.
StudioMax was largely responsible for cratering the the price point in this market which was a benefit to all those who couldn't pay $30-40K for a piece of software but it really complicated life for software developers, because they R&D costs are enormous and they've had to try to go mass market to stay afloat, and in this area even the mass market isn't very mass.
As for which project wins when the inevitable consolidation comes its impossible to say. Half of it will be marketing driven and half of it ill be driven by the power struggle between the two teams in Toronto and Montreal. If all the Toronto execs take their money and run, and all the management is dominated by Montreal it will require serious market pressure in favor of Maya for it to survive as the dominant package.
"and then Autodesk releases an all new MayaMax which consolidates the best features of both programs"
Thats sounds good but in reality its usually really hard. The architectures are completely different. It usually means a complete rewrite if you want to take actual code for a feature out of Max and put it in Maya's architecture. All Max's developer will have a steep learning curve to start developing code for Maya and vice versa. You can take the idea behind a feature and develop it for another app but both teams already rip off everything they see in the other app they like, patents permitting. Its easier to do if you have bought the developer certainly.
Alternately you start from scratch and build a whole new app from scratch with both teams, which is what Maya was but its enormously hard and expensive, and it will take a miracle to break even after all the sunk R&D cost. You also have a struggle over architecture between the two teams if you keep them both.
"When a company goes under like this, everyone loses even the execs."
You apparently have no grasp of the business world. The execs at the top of Alias food chain could care less what happens to their company, their employees, their software or their customers. They have big stakes in the company, usually in stock, and all they want out of this merger is the ability to cash out their stock at a big profit and move on to a new venture or retire on a boat in Florida surrounded by golddiggers in bikini's. That is why proprietary software is such a high risk for customers. The execs that own it will sell it down the river if the price is right.
The point you are missing is that these applications aren't designed to target a specific niche. Its just that they are such broad applications being developed with very limited resources that they end up better in some areas than others. Their limited staff also an expertise mix that results in strength in places and weakness in others. Certainly Max focused games so it acceled there, but if they could have pulled it off they would have loved to own animation too.
I assure you Autodesk wants all of Maya's animation market, and Alias wanted all of Autodesk's games markets, and always have, they just didn't manage to accomplish it through R&D and competition. If you fail to do it competitively the next best option is merger.
"Actually, you couldn't be more wrong about how mergers have shaped Maya up until now."
Well actually you couldn't be more wrong. Maya was a product dominated by Alias and Toronto. They did keep the TDI Paris team on the payroll and they did carry forward TDI rendering and poly concepts but it wasn't for the better. Maya's TDI like rendering was one of its weakest points, which is why any user that could afford it used Renderman, and then Mental Ray. It also look a long time before the TDI inspired poly tools got on their feet. Wavefront did contribute dynamics and IK to Maya, since it did have strength there in dynamics and IK though I imagine users will argue whether Alias or Wavefront's approach was better. Maya's development was dominated and led by Alias.
You then just need to look at where the jobs went. TDI's Paris office was the first office to close, and they were laid off, as soon as Maya shipped 1.0. Wavefront's Santa Barbara office lasted longer but I think its either gone or now tiny compared to what it once was.
You also just need to notice that Alias Studio/Poweranimator continued a long happy life, while TDI Explore was the first to be snuffed out, and Wavefront's product lines went second.
This is also very predictable language designed to calm the fears of the affected customers and get them to sit tight for a while. It is no indicator at all as to what Autodesk will actually do with these product lines in a year or two. Having expensive, overlapping R&D efforts and teams scattered around the globe almost never works out in the long run and eventually there is streamlining(layoffs) and consolidation(end of lifed products) to improve business efficiency.
Maya isn't "THE software used to create all theses 3d animated motion picture". Its one of many applications used by the movies studios, they use Softimage and Houdini and probably Max and a host of other commercial applications. More importantly the big studios develop a LOT of their own software in house. Studios tend to use whatever does a particular job best for them, and for which they can find operators who are skilled and who comfortable with a particular app. Fact is every app is stong in one area and weak in another. Maya is good in animation, and programmability, weak in modeling and rendering.
Animation studios should be prime candidates to switch to open source and cooperation, they duplicate massive effort developing in house software. They cling to the idea the software is a competitive edge, maybe it is but I doubt it, at least not for the money they sink in to it. They also routinely get burned by proprietary software companies as they will probably get burned here when Maya gets put on life support by Autodesk.
Re:AutoCAD is too far up MSs back end...
on
Autodesk Acquires Alias
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The most likely outcome is Alias products get put on life support and in a year or two Autodesk announces there next generation package, and tries to force all of Alias customers over to it and then slowly kills off the old Alias product line. Thats what happened when Wavefront bought TDI, and then basically what happened to Wavefront when it was on the bottom end of the SGI/Alias/Wavefront merger.
There is way to much overlap between Maya and Max for them to carry both product lines forward forever and I doubt they will ditch Max in favor of Maya.
Mergers like this are usually to get rid of a competitor and take their customers. It is a market in need of consolidation because there are to many packages selling to relatively few users for not enough money. The execs of the company being bought do it because they get rich cashing out and could care less about either the employees or customers both of whom usually get screwed.
It will be interesting what happens to Maya's use at high end studios. The high end business commands a lot of prestige and companies want bragging rights that they are used at them, so every 13 year old aspiring animator will want to learn Maya or Softimage. In reality its a terrible business, because studios buy a relatively small number of seats infrequently, they develop a lot of their own software and they constantly play the software companies off against each other. If Autodesk is thinking business they will let the high end business fade away, if they are thinking prestige they will try to keep it and it will probably cost them a lot of money.
A key question is how Google and Sun are going to run this.
A. Based on Google's established model you would guess the web software will be hosted in their server farms along with your documents. The appeal here is you always have access to your docs and office software no matter where you are.
B. Or they sell you the server and client software and you host the server on your LAN and the appeal is just that you have one frontend to all you do, your web browser. This is not really that appealing though. Only value in a web front end is to actually use it over a network. This is a dubious business model since its doubtful people will switch to it if its not free, and I doubt Google want to do this unless they are locking you in to their portal. Maybe they would do it just to stick a finger in Microsoft's eye.
The burning problem with A, is that you put all your documents on someone else's server you have a MASSIVE security and confidentiality problem. Its pretty much the same as if back in the snail mail days we put all our letters in the mail box without envelopes so the postmen and everyone else at the post office could read everything we write. Or no its worse than that, its not just the docs we send out in to the world, its opening up EVERYTHING you write for someone to read. Even worse if you start to use it for keeping books then all your finances are completely exposed to outsiders. I'm pretty sure by law no publicly traded company could use a service like this for financial or business data that could be used for insider trading. Wouldn't it be sweet though if Google could con everyone in to putting all their business data on their servers and then they could just mine it for insider stock tips. I always figured this would be a pretty entertaining business model for free mail services, just sit there and mine all the email traffic for insider stock tips.
Bottomline is it would be suicidal for any nontrivial business that has any confidential documents to use a web service for their office suite.
An even worse edge to this in an era where we have a dramatically expanding police state is it will be a boon to the FBI, SEC and intelligence agencies who want to data mine for criminals and terrorists. Not only can they look at and listen to your email, phone, electronic purchasing habits and web browsing, now they can read EVERYTHING you do on your computer without the inconvenience of breaking down your door.
WWW is a not particularly special evolution of the Internet. Its a convenience layer. The hardware and protocols of the internet are the much more substantial accomplishment. There also isn't any infrastructure associated with WWW.
"Oh, wait: the WWW isn't owned by anyone anymore and neither is the Internet."
Oh wait there isn't anything tangible with WWW, its just standards so you are correct no one owns it. There is physical infrastructure in the Internet and the U.S. DOES own the root servers and always has.
" but this is not contradictory to a Int Body governing the allocation of address blocks to each country or determining policy for TLDs."
Well from a U.S. perspective it certainly is undesirable to do this. If they turn it over to an international body and that body votes 10-1 to seize 90% of the U.S. IP space and the.mil and.gov domains the U.S is screwed. That is exactly the kind of thing the U.N. could do. They might say every country gets an equal part of the address space and at least in the General Assembly Tonga and Lichtenstein have the same number of votes as the U.S. so they can band together to pass it.
There are two serious problems with everything the U.N. does.
- It is an extremely corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy which is very badly managed. Almost no one can dispute that at this point.
- Every issue is decided not based on issues and merits but by never ending maneuvering and vote buying. In the general assembly ever issue is decided by blocks of tiny countries who use their one country one vote to stick their finger in the eye of the powers or to extort favors for votes. In the security council nothing gets decided unless all the powers who have been arbitrarily given veto power agree on it.
I'm not normally pro American, though I am one, but the U.S. DID DEVELOP THE INTERNET. Its pretty petty for other countries to say thanks for the fish but we are now taking control of the thing you invented because we like it, though we had nothing to do with creating it.
The interesting theoretical is if there would be an Internet were it not for the U.S. and DARPA.
Big talk on Slashdot. First time a team of cops really knocks down your door and halls you away to prison indefinitely, or worse a Rendition teams throws you on a plane to a torture chamber in a 3rd world shit hole I think you would be wishing that civilized society had insured that your right to due process had been preserved. Governments are a product of society, they are what we make them and what we let them be.
You see you as an individual have virtually no power to defend yourself from the massive power and resources of government. The only real power you have to protect yourself is you band together with a bunch of other individuals who want their home to be their castle and to be safe in both body and thoughts, and you don't elect assholes to government, nor do you let power mad assholes seize power against the will of the people as happened in 2000.
"What's NOT a subject for debate is that the bill of rights guarantees that an individual is innocent until proven guilty."
Well obviously it IS a subject for debate because the Bush administration has held Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, in a Navy brig in South Carolina, for something like 3 years, in communicado, no charges filed, no lawyer, no court hearing, no access to family. The Supreme court refused to hear the case the first time on a technicality so it had to wind through the court for another year. They rebuked the Bush administration for it the second time though amazingly it didn't change a thing. The government says they have a case against him for plotting a "dirty bomb" attack but to my knowledge they've never proven a thing.
There was also a prominent DOJ terrorism case against two Muslim men in Detriot. The lynchpins of the DOJ case were:
- Testimony of a known conman who implicated them in exchange for reduced charges in his own case
- A typical tourist video of Disneyland which the DOJ insisted they were using to plot a terrorist attack on Disneyland and only cleverly disguised it to look exactly like about a 100 million other tourist videos of Disneyland.
The men were convicted and it was only later the conman made a jailhouse confession that he lied to get his sentence reduced which led to the conviction being overturned after they'd endured a couple years of hell. The were blatantly framed by a DOJ desperate for terrorism convictions which have been few and far between since 9/11. The few there have been have been on REALLY shaky ground.
So it is clearly open to debate if you have a right to due process and to be innocent in this country especially since 9/11 and since the U.S. decided to turn to Fascism wholesale.
Something I find odd about all these news stories about putting back doors and wire tap capabilities in all the new IP communications channels is it seems like exactly the wrong approach if you really want to catch criminals and terrorists.
A basic tenant of eavesdropping and code breaking is you want the people you are spying on to think their communication channel is secure so they will share juicy secrets with you. If they read these stories about how the FBI has a backdoor in VoIP it just ensures they wont say anything sensitive over a VoIP channel or if they do there will be a second layer of obfuscation or encryption at play.
I can see the FBI wanting the backdoor but you would think they wouldn't want to advertise it. The only thing they accomplish with this approach is they catch people who are dumb enough to use a known insecure comm channel, or you are denying criminals and terrorist VoIP as a comm channel or at least if they use it they have to add a second layer of encryption. The only other thing they accomplish is they scare and intimidate the general public which they seem to be doing quite well. Maybe its just another tool to train everyone to be good sheep and keep their mouths shut at all times.
If I were the NSA or FBI what I would do is design a crypto package, let's call it PGP for example, that had a very subtle and very hard to spot back door in it. I would then get some people to release it to the world as a supposedly secure way to defeat NSA eavesdropping. I would persecute the people who release it just enough to make it look like I was unhappy about it and unable to break it, but I'd make sure it was widely distributed and used, and in particular used by people who need to communicate things they want to hide from the NSA. I would then sit back and rake in all these nuggets from all the people who thought that if they just encrypted their secrets they would be private.
I think you need to recognize there is internal inconsistency in what you are saying. You seem to think you have a right to privacy in your communication to other people only if you have the technical prowess to defeat anyone trying to eavesdrop on it. What if you use that prowess to blow the whistle on wrong doing by someone like John Negroponte. Mr. Negroponte uses all the resource of his NSA to intercept and crack your encryption, read your message, takes umbrage and sends a rendition team to make you disappear. Did you have a right to privacy and to not have Mr. Negroponte read your mail, or are you to blame for not using sufficiently powerful encryption to defend yourself. You see you have no clue what the NSA can crack and what they can't. Me I would prefer governments are disallowed from eavesdropping at all, by law, instead of having to engage in a crypto arms race with them to defend my privacy,
I would also prefer to not be placed under suspicion of wrong doing by the mere act of using strong encryption to defend my privacy, and that is the other edge of this sword.
I'm of the school of thought that governments shouldn't be eavesdropping on its citizens communications at all. It may mean a criminal or a terrorist gets away but that is a small price to pay to prevent abuse of power by government.
The essence of Roe v Wade and why the right to privacy decided it is that until the baby is born it is the mother's, and to a lesser extent the father's, right to choose the fate of their genetic material, NOT YOU. I'm certainly willing to concede that late term abortions are an undesirable thing, but its completely insane to attribute living being status to a fertilized egg. It is genetic material, there is plenty more where that came from. There is no shortage of babies on this planet, many of whom can't be fed, why not worry about them instead of the ones who aren't born yet. Mandating birth follow from every act of sex was perhaps acceptable a few hundred years ago when the planet was empty. With todays' overpopulation its suicidal or maybe the better word is genocidal to compell population explosion based on religious zealotry.
To me the beauty of the right to privacy and Roe V. Wade is that is says YOU get to decide the fate of YOUR genetic material. If you consider a fertilized egg as life then its your prerogative to not abort the product of your loins. This means, for example, the government can't force you to abort a child or have only one child as China did. But it also means YOU can't inflict your religious views on someone else and tell them they have to carry every fertilized egg to birth, or that they can't use birth control. Its none of your business if someone else doesn't want to bring a child in to this overcrowded world. Children should be born in to families that want them.
You should try reading Freakonimics. It draws a strong correlation between unwanted pregnancies, the legalization of abortion and the current plunging crime rate in the U.S. Many criminals are products of homes where they were either unwanted or where their parents lacked the means to raise them properly. Abortion led to a dramatic drop in unwanted kids who couldn't be raised properly, and it may be why the crime rate is dropping now.
Any right you think you have and you think the Constitution affords you is history the day the Supreme Court votes 5-4 and says you don't.
Unfortunately the Constitution and the Republic, while ingenious in many respects, was known by the founding fathers to be highly fallible. In particular the one thing you couldn't prevent in a representative Democracy, is that the majority of voters would devolve in to ignorance, and be blinded by fear mongering and propaganda so they do stupid things and vote for bad people. Those bad people in turn pass bad laws and pack the courts with bad people who can then shred every thing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights stood for, and with ease too.
"I'm just curious, how are you defining "Fascism?""
Authoritarian capitalism, police state, no due process, dominated by one party which suffocates all opposition. It maintains a facade of capitalism which differentiates it from Communism and authoritarian socialism. However rather than free markets the government and the party dominates all aspects of economic life that matter, and in particular intervene in economic affairs whenever it benefits and enriches favored party members.
A penchant for militarism and aggressive warfare to gain its objectives. Massive investment in armaments and the willingness to use them to dominate its allies and enemies alike.
Fear mongering to make the population pliant to manipulation and control by the party. It was a classic technique perfected in Nazi Germany. The Nazi's version of 9/11 was the Reichstag fire. Its likely the Nazi's burned it but they framed a naked, mentally ill communist for it, and used it as justification for seizing power in face of an imminent "threat" form the Communists and the Jews.
Fascist states are defined by being rabidly anticommunist, which has defined the U.S. for the last century. In the 1930's many Americans were very supportive of Nazi Germany because both Germany and the U.S. were staunchly anti Soviet. George W.'s grandfather Prescott was the U.S. banker for the Thyssen family, one of Germany's richest which helped bankroll Hitlers rise to power. His Union Banking assets were seized for trading with the enemy when the U.S. declared war. Most of the 3rd world dictators we suppored in the twentieth century were Fascist regimes too, they were people we installed who were willing to kill socialist and communists indiscriminately. This gets back to Negropontes role in building right wing death squads in Central America as the U.S. waged a secret war against Socialism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
The U.S. is a somewhat benign form of Fascism, it does maintain a pretense of free elections but they are looking less free every iteration. If the Republican's retain their grip on power in 2006 and certainly by 2008 by suckering the electorate, exploiting a crisis(real or fabricated), rigging elections I don't think there will be much doubt this will be a Fascist state for a long time. One can only hope that Americans are becoming sufficiently disgusted with one party rule that they throw the Republicans out of a branch or two. If they don't basic liberties in this country are in real peril. I don't want the Democrats to have power either, since they are barely distinguishable for Republicans these days, a nice grid lock is desirable at present when both options are horrendously bad. The Republicans have engaged in such an effective and savage propaganda campaign against the Dems I'm not sure the Dems will gain control of anything. If the Republicans have a few more years to pack the courts that will finish the process of seizing power.
Nice unverifiable electronic voting will be a great tool for maintaining the pretense of free elections when they are in fact rigged.
The U.S. does still have due process most of the time but Little George has managed to set precedent for completely eviscerating it with Jose Padilla among others. If you don't have due process all the time for all citizens you don't really have it at all. Right now we only have it when its convenient for the White House and until they fabricate a terrorism charge against you which they apparently never have to prove in court.
The U.S. is building an all powerful combined police force, domestic, and foreign spying capacity that would be the envy of the Gestapo or KGB, under John Negroponte, a right wing Machiavellian if ever there was one. Imagine if the Gestapo only had computers and spy satellites.
The U.S. is, through the rendition program, seizing people at will anywhere on the globe, and sending them in to torture chambers around the globe. Sure sounds a lot like the Gestapo to me, except t
"There's only a debate if you don't know how to read."
How about this for a deal, I'll learn to read if you learn to write.
This statement is best described as ambiguous. You might be saying if I knew how to read I would understand that there is no right to privacy, or you might be saying if I could read I would know there is an indisputable right to privacy.
If you read the link I provided or you watched the confirmation hearing for Chief Justice Roberts on CSPAN, you would understand there is a huge debate over whether there is a right to privacy and what its bounds are. The Supreme Court has decided both ways on whether wire tapping violates our Constitution or our right to privacy, ergo there IS a debate.
Me personally I hope there is such a right and our courts will uphold it and slap down all the politicians, law enforcement officers and bureaucrats who want to usurp it using fear mongering. Unfortunately we live in a complex society. There are no inalienable rights that we can take as a given. The only rights we have are the ones we successfully fight to preserve. If we let a group of people seize control of the White House and Congress who have no regard for the rights of individuals and who are power mad, they can stack the courts to their liking and they can do whatever they feel like with our rights.
"Next overrated troll."
Next anonymous coward who can't make a coherent argument and who resorts to ad hominem attacks instead. Why don't you try making a coherent argument next time.
Slashdot Mirror
You really need to look no further than the virus. It is little more than a small bit of DNA or RNA and a protective coating. They generally are parasites on cells since they don't have some of the machinery to reproduce on their own, but as you can tell from the epidemics and pandemics they cause they are a quite successful form of life at its most elemental level.
One things people who fall for intelligent design refuse to appreciate is that life has had hundreds of millions of years to evolve and perfect itself. We can't get our heads around that but that is an enormous number of cycles of mutation and natural selection that would inevitably lead to great diversity and complexity over time. Living organisms have to work because if they don't they die. All the failed mutations are dead, we only see the ones that worked so we are amazed life works but if it didn't we wouldn't be here to judge.
You would be really hard pressed to explain why an intelligent omnipotent being would have made all the design mistakes that we carry with. For example why would an intelligent designer give us an appendix that frequently threatens to kill us.
"and they dispute that such a thing could have evolved out of less complex parts."
So where did their creator and intelligent designer come from then? I think I could visualize random interactions of molecules leading to life better than I could that there is some omnipotent intelligence that has existed for eternity or whom just popped in to existence one day. That is at least as far fetched as amino acids randomly assembling themselves in to a virus or proto cell.
"With our increasing knowledge of the mechanics of life, it's a matter of time until somebody succeeds in creating life from scratch."
Probably, but I doubt it will be in a U.S. government funded lab. As soon as the religious fundamentalists, who once again dominate the U.S., figure out government scientists are trying to create life without God or screwing this will get shut down. Not sure that would be a bad thing in this case.
We know just enough about biology and nanotechnology at this point to be really dangerous sometimes. We can do a lot of wonderful things with drugs and biochemistry but we also manage to create a string of unintended consequences and side effects. We create antibiotics to eliminate the scourge of infections but we create superbugs that are increasingly immune to everything. We create Vioxx to ease arthritis but it ends up causing heart attacks and strokes. And the most insidious unintended consequence of our advance in medicine, most people don't appreciate, we have extended our life spans, if you have the money, to the point that we live much longer than we should, we have people living a poor quality of life for decades in their 80's and 90's draining societies resources, and worse we are producing an exploding population. I'm not sure near technology synthesized immortality is such a great thing. There is benefit in the renewal that comes with the old dieing and letting young, fresh people take over.
Nice rant. I'd be inclined to agree that the environmental extremist are ... well ... extremists. Of course so are of the free marketeer, I want to make my millions, everyone else be damned, capitalist extremists. Extremists are extremists, and there are extremists occupying every idealogical niche.
Marine mammals evoke a lot of sympathy from environmentalists because they are mammals like us and they have language like us and they have big brains like us. We also hunted many of their families to extinction. The Right Whale got its name because it was the "right" whale for harpooning because its body weight was 40% blubber so they floated well when harpooned, and they produced rich quantities of whale oil. Whale oil was used in lamps and candle wax, it was one of our early forms of energy before we switched to fossil fuel addiction.
Me I'm quite fond of technology and all but the key problem I see with humans and our planet, isn't so much what we do on and to our planet, the main problem is there are simply getting to be to many of us. We are quickly filling every habitable corner of the planet and we are crowding out every other life form on the planet.
We are, for example, mowing down the rain forests at an astonishing rate. Blairo Maggi the governor of Mato Grosso in the heart of the Amazon in Brazil, who is responsible for the oversight of the rain forests there, also happens to be one of the world's largest soy bean producers, he is known as "Rei de Soja" the King of Soya. He is an extremist too, except instead of being an environmental extremist he is a capitalist extremist, he wants to mow down the Amazon's rain forest for lumber and to clear land for soy fields and cattle ranches to enrich himself and the other large land owners in his province. A small number of people will be enriched, and the world will lose one of its last great ecological treasures.
The main problem we have with technology is we've used it to eliminate many of the natural mechanisms for keeping population in check. We have eliminated a lot of disease so our life spans are longer. We've used technology to increase food production both on land and from the sea to push back starvation. End result is we have population explosion.
We could use technology to expand birth control and family planning to compensate but unfortunately religion, Catholicism and Islam in particular are working to frustrate birth control. Unfortunately organized religions have for millenia been designed to value increasing the size of their flock, because numbers were how they gained power and wealth.
So what do we have technology and religion both working to fuel massive population growth. We can no doubt sustain it for a while longer, maybe even until after we are all dead, but at some point the earth is going to crash. We are going to run out of some vital resources, for example, fossil fuels, fresh water, or food and there is going to be an ugly population crash. Another possibility is nature will regain a foothold and a global pandemic will restore the basic laws of population control to humans.
Bottomline is I guess I'm saying technology is all well and good as long as we learn to be responsible members of the ecosphere because at present we are not. The simplest step toward that goal would be to:
A - Make contraceptives universally available
B - Hit major religions with a clue bat, the pope and Christian fundamentalists in particular, and point out to them that continuing to frustrate birth contol will eventually and inevitably destroy our species and our planet.
Of course it would have been cheaper still to not have sent them to a place like Iraq in the first place, a couple thousand Americans wouldn't be dead now, and thousands more wouldn't be burned or missing limbs. The problem with the calculus you are engaged in is you could always spend a few more billion and make the soldiers just a little safer, or hey build robotic soldiers and let the soldiers sit at their base playing Halo but in real life. Problem is it would bankrupt the U.S. .... oh wait. Military spending is great when it produces technology that can be spun off to peaceful uses, otherwise its a giant hole in the ground and the U.S. is pouring money in to that hole at a furious pace while the rest of the U.S. economy is in near collapse thanks to China (reference a $700 billion trade deficit and a current account deficit approachign a trillion). The U.S. as a whole is doing the same thing to many American's do now, staying prosperous using charge cards, which is a practice that eventually ends in bankruptcy.
.... except for all the contractors who are making windfall profits on war profiteering, something that has been a hallmark and prime motivator of wars since the dawn of civilization.
Military spending has only two forms of economic value:
A. You need enough to dissuade another power from attacking you, the U.S. has both more than enough to do that, and will never have enough to stop insurgent attacks
B. You use your military power to invade and intimidate other countries to acquire control of their economic assets, oil for instance. The U.S. increasingly seems to being doing that, the only flaw is when it reaches the point of invastion the occupations are costing vastly more than any economic benefit and insurgent attacks have decimated things like Iraqi oil production, so there was little economic benefit from the increasing fondness of the U.S. for aggressive warfare
As an aside if you've been following the Judith Miller case, the reporter for the New York Times, its starting to look like she was a propaganda tool of Dick Cheney's office who went to extraordinary lengths to whip up WMD fears about Iraq at the behest of the White House while posing as a journalist with supposed integrity, independence and dedication to the truth. It kind of appears the White House manipulated the supposedly free press in to fabricating and propagandizing their case for a war based on lies.
An illuminating anecdote I saw on the news yesterday. The CEO of Delphi, the car parts company that just declared bankruptcy was on stage ranting about turning his failed company around. He had three solutions:
- Move all his manufacturing to China or some other dirt cheap place which they'd already started doing a year or more ago
- Compell their American workers to take a 63% pay cut.
- Increase compensation for the executive and management team. The executive of a bankrupt company are a hot commodity with head hunters and so he needed to shower money on his executives while they destroy their American workers.
Thanks to the intentional demolition of trade barriers, cheap container shipping, cheap telecom and intentional support for illegal immigration, we have, thanks to politicians and business leaders, entered in to a delightful world where wages for working people will be globally pushed down to a small fraction of the wage rates in the U.S. and Western Europe today. Will cost of living and cost of housing also go down, probably not or at least not nearly as much. Chances are we are going to see exploding poverty, unemployment and homelessness in the U.S. and Western Europe.
But if you have wealth and capital, or are in the top ranks of management and are able to exploit cheap labor rates and globalization you can get very rich and continue to live very well.
"Excessive use of the Internet, on the other hand, could lead to independent thought, social instability, and rebellion."
Or it leads to playing WoW all day every day and you turn in to a vegetable. You will also do anything the state demands of you as long as they provide high internet access and long stretches of uninterrupted game time.
If you've player WoW lately you know that it is increasingly being overrun by Chinese, many of whom are making a living off it farming and reselling gold on assorted web sites. You now frequently get spammed with whispered ads for these sites, like gmworker.com.
I wouldn't be surprised if the formerly Communist, now Fascist Party, of China is putting all of their less useful citizens in front of WoW and making them farm all day as a way to transfer dollars from the pockets of western teens in to China's GDP.
"Sure, it costs money, and hassle...everything does. Especially when you want to do something right."
As tight as the margins are in this market now, as low as the volume is, and expensive the R&D costs, it really is hard to build these things from scratch any more and break even, unless maybe you do it in India or China where the labor is dirt cheap. Canada is some cheaper, but not enough. The talent is sparse in this field and you already have to assemble it from all over the world. The western talent isn't likely to take a massive pay cut and end up in India or China.
It was easier to do back when you could charge $30-40k a seat and there was less competition.
"I think that Maya will get axed and the Maya engineers will do some minor stuff in 3dsmax v.10."
Well in thinking about it I've moved to the position that its a 50/50 toss up which one gets axed. I really doubt both will continue on as they are. I just don't have enough insight in the market position of the two, or how the politics will play out. When Autodesk bought Discrete it kind of looks like Discrete won out since everything ended up in Montreal. The Max team might not have enough of a position to come out the winner at this point.
Its possible Discrete has enough of a dislike for Alias the company they will gut it, move all the developers they can to Montreal but make Maya their flagship.
"especially in the lucrative and prestigious movie segment"
The movie segment is "prestigious", I doubt its lucrative. It was when back in the day when they were paying $30-40K a seat, and paying through the nose for maintenance. When you are selling software for $2-3K I wager the movie studios are break even at best for the software companies. You do want them because they help drive ideas for product development but the stuff they want might not have much relation to what the mass market wants. Mostly you just want them because wannabe animators want to use what the studios use, or actually they have to learn it if they want to get a job there someday.
StudioMax was largely responsible for cratering the the price point in this market which was a benefit to all those who couldn't pay $30-40K for a piece of software but it really complicated life for software developers, because they R&D costs are enormous and they've had to try to go mass market to stay afloat, and in this area even the mass market isn't very mass.
As for which project wins when the inevitable consolidation comes its impossible to say. Half of it will be marketing driven and half of it ill be driven by the power struggle between the two teams in Toronto and Montreal. If all the Toronto execs take their money and run, and all the management is dominated by Montreal it will require serious market pressure in favor of Maya for it to survive as the dominant package.
"and then Autodesk releases an all new MayaMax which consolidates the best features of both programs"
Thats sounds good but in reality its usually really hard. The architectures are completely different. It usually means a complete rewrite if you want to take actual code for a feature out of Max and put it in Maya's architecture. All Max's developer will have a steep learning curve to start developing code for Maya and vice versa. You can take the idea behind a feature and develop it for another app but both teams already rip off everything they see in the other app they like, patents permitting. Its easier to do if you have bought the developer certainly.
Alternately you start from scratch and build a whole new app from scratch with both teams, which is what Maya was but its enormously hard and expensive, and it will take a miracle to break even after all the sunk R&D cost. You also have a struggle over architecture between the two teams if you keep them both.
"When a company goes under like this, everyone loses even the execs."
You apparently have no grasp of the business world. The execs at the top of Alias food chain could care less what happens to their company, their employees, their software or their customers. They have big stakes in the company, usually in stock, and all they want out of this merger is the ability to cash out their stock at a big profit and move on to a new venture or retire on a boat in Florida surrounded by golddiggers in bikini's. That is why proprietary software is such a high risk for customers. The execs that own it will sell it down the river if the price is right.
The point you are missing is that these applications aren't designed to target a specific niche. Its just that they are such broad applications being developed with very limited resources that they end up better in some areas than others. Their limited staff also an expertise mix that results in strength in places and weakness in others. Certainly Max focused games so it acceled there, but if they could have pulled it off they would have loved to own animation too.
I assure you Autodesk wants all of Maya's animation market, and Alias wanted all of Autodesk's games markets, and always have, they just didn't manage to accomplish it through R&D and competition. If you fail to do it competitively the next best option is merger.
"Actually, you couldn't be more wrong about how mergers have shaped Maya up until now."
Well actually you couldn't be more wrong. Maya was a product dominated by Alias and Toronto. They did keep the TDI Paris team on the payroll and they did carry forward TDI rendering and poly concepts but it wasn't for the better. Maya's TDI like rendering was one of its weakest points, which is why any user that could afford it used Renderman, and then Mental Ray. It also look a long time before the TDI inspired poly tools got on their feet. Wavefront did contribute dynamics and IK to Maya, since it did have strength there in dynamics and IK though I imagine users will argue whether Alias or Wavefront's approach was better. Maya's development was dominated and led by Alias.
You then just need to look at where the jobs went. TDI's Paris office was the first office to close, and they were laid off, as soon as Maya shipped 1.0. Wavefront's Santa Barbara office lasted longer but I think its either gone or now tiny compared to what it once was.
You also just need to notice that Alias Studio/Poweranimator continued a long happy life, while TDI Explore was the first to be snuffed out, and Wavefront's product lines went second.
This is also very predictable language designed to calm the fears of the affected customers and get them to sit tight for a while. It is no indicator at all as to what Autodesk will actually do with these product lines in a year or two. Having expensive, overlapping R&D efforts and teams scattered around the globe almost never works out in the long run and eventually there is streamlining(layoffs) and consolidation(end of lifed products) to improve business efficiency.
Maya isn't "THE software used to create all theses 3d animated motion picture". Its one of many applications used by the movies studios, they use Softimage and Houdini and probably Max and a host of other commercial applications. More importantly the big studios develop a LOT of their own software in house. Studios tend to use whatever does a particular job best for them, and for which they can find operators who are skilled and who comfortable with a particular app. Fact is every app is stong in one area and weak in another. Maya is good in animation, and programmability, weak in modeling and rendering.
Animation studios should be prime candidates to switch to open source and cooperation, they duplicate massive effort developing in house software. They cling to the idea the software is a competitive edge, maybe it is but I doubt it, at least not for the money they sink in to it. They also routinely get burned by proprietary software companies as they will probably get burned here when Maya gets put on life support by Autodesk.
The most likely outcome is Alias products get put on life support and in a year or two Autodesk announces there next generation package, and tries to force all of Alias customers over to it and then slowly kills off the old Alias product line. Thats what happened when Wavefront bought TDI, and then basically what happened to Wavefront when it was on the bottom end of the SGI/Alias/Wavefront merger.
There is way to much overlap between Maya and Max for them to carry both product lines forward forever and I doubt they will ditch Max in favor of Maya.
Mergers like this are usually to get rid of a competitor and take their customers. It is a market in need of consolidation because there are to many packages selling to relatively few users for not enough money. The execs of the company being bought do it because they get rich cashing out and could care less about either the employees or customers both of whom usually get screwed.
It will be interesting what happens to Maya's use at high end studios. The high end business commands a lot of prestige and companies want bragging rights that they are used at them, so every 13 year old aspiring animator will want to learn Maya or Softimage. In reality its a terrible business, because studios buy a relatively small number of seats infrequently, they develop a lot of their own software and they constantly play the software companies off against each other. If Autodesk is thinking business they will let the high end business fade away, if they are thinking prestige they will try to keep it and it will probably cost them a lot of money.
A key question is how Google and Sun are going to run this.
A. Based on Google's established model you would guess the web software will be hosted in their server farms along with your documents. The appeal here is you always have access to your docs and office software no matter where you are.
B. Or they sell you the server and client software and you host the server on your LAN and the appeal is just that you have one frontend to all you do, your web browser. This is not really that appealing though. Only value in a web front end is to actually use it over a network. This is a dubious business model since its doubtful people will switch to it if its not free, and I doubt Google want to do this unless they are locking you in to their portal. Maybe they would do it just to stick a finger in Microsoft's eye.
The burning problem with A, is that you put all your documents on someone else's server you have a MASSIVE security and confidentiality problem. Its pretty much the same as if back in the snail mail days we put all our letters in the mail box without envelopes so the postmen and everyone else at the post office could read everything we write. Or no its worse than that, its not just the docs we send out in to the world, its opening up EVERYTHING you write for someone to read. Even worse if you start to use it for keeping books then all your finances are completely exposed to outsiders. I'm pretty sure by law no publicly traded company could use a service like this for financial or business data that could be used for insider trading. Wouldn't it be sweet though if Google could con everyone in to putting all their business data on their servers and then they could just mine it for insider stock tips. I always figured this would be a pretty entertaining business model for free mail services, just sit there and mine all the email traffic for insider stock tips.
Bottomline is it would be suicidal for any nontrivial business that has any confidential documents to use a web service for their office suite.
An even worse edge to this in an era where we have a dramatically expanding police state is it will be a boon to the FBI, SEC and intelligence agencies who want to data mine for criminals and terrorists. Not only can they look at and listen to your email, phone, electronic purchasing habits and web browsing, now they can read EVERYTHING you do on your computer without the inconvenience of breaking down your door.
WWW is a not particularly special evolution of the Internet. Its a convenience layer. The hardware and protocols of the internet are the much more substantial accomplishment. There also isn't any infrastructure associated with WWW.
"Oh, wait: the WWW isn't owned by anyone anymore and neither is the Internet."
Oh wait there isn't anything tangible with WWW, its just standards so you are correct no one owns it. There is physical infrastructure in the Internet and the U.S. DOES own the root servers and always has.
" but this is not contradictory to a Int Body governing the allocation of address blocks to each country or determining policy for TLDs."
.mil and .gov domains the U.S is screwed. That is exactly the kind of thing the U.N. could do. They might say every country gets an equal part of the address space and at least in the General Assembly Tonga and Lichtenstein have the same number of votes as the U.S. so they can band together to pass it.
Well from a U.S. perspective it certainly is undesirable to do this. If they turn it over to an international body and that body votes 10-1 to seize 90% of the U.S. IP space and the
There are two serious problems with everything the U.N. does.
- It is an extremely corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy which is very badly managed. Almost no one can dispute that at this point.
- Every issue is decided not based on issues and merits but by never ending maneuvering and vote buying. In the general assembly ever issue is decided by blocks of tiny countries who use their one country one vote to stick their finger in the eye of the powers or to extort favors for votes. In the security council nothing gets decided unless all the powers who have been arbitrarily given veto power agree on it.
I'm not normally pro American, though I am one, but the U.S. DID DEVELOP THE INTERNET. Its pretty petty for other countries to say thanks for the fish but we are now taking control of the thing you invented because we like it, though we had nothing to do with creating it.
The interesting theoretical is if there would be an Internet were it not for the U.S. and DARPA.
Big talk on Slashdot. First time a team of cops really knocks down your door and halls you away to prison indefinitely, or worse a Rendition teams throws you on a plane to a torture chamber in a 3rd world shit hole I think you would be wishing that civilized society had insured that your right to due process had been preserved. Governments are a product of society, they are what we make them and what we let them be.
You see you as an individual have virtually no power to defend yourself from the massive power and resources of government. The only real power you have to protect yourself is you band together with a bunch of other individuals who want their home to be their castle and to be safe in both body and thoughts, and you don't elect assholes to government, nor do you let power mad assholes seize power against the will of the people as happened in 2000.
"What's NOT a subject for debate is that the bill of rights guarantees that an individual is innocent until proven guilty."
Well obviously it IS a subject for debate because the Bush administration has held Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, in a Navy brig in South Carolina, for something like 3 years, in communicado, no charges filed, no lawyer, no court hearing, no access to family. The Supreme court refused to hear the case the first time on a technicality so it had to wind through the court for another year. They rebuked the Bush administration for it the second time though amazingly it didn't change a thing. The government says they have a case against him for plotting a "dirty bomb" attack but to my knowledge they've never proven a thing.
There was also a prominent DOJ terrorism case against two Muslim men in Detriot. The lynchpins of the DOJ case were:
- Testimony of a known conman who implicated them in exchange for reduced charges in his own case
- A typical tourist video of Disneyland which the DOJ insisted they were using to plot a terrorist attack on Disneyland and only cleverly disguised it to look exactly like about a 100 million other tourist videos of Disneyland.
The men were convicted and it was only later the conman made a jailhouse confession that he lied to get his sentence reduced which led to the conviction being overturned after they'd endured a couple years of hell. The were blatantly framed by a DOJ desperate for terrorism convictions which have been few and far between since 9/11. The few there have been have been on REALLY shaky ground.
So it is clearly open to debate if you have a right to due process and to be innocent in this country especially since 9/11 and since the U.S. decided to turn to Fascism wholesale.
Something I find odd about all these news stories about putting back doors and wire tap capabilities in all the new IP communications channels is it seems like exactly the wrong approach if you really want to catch criminals and terrorists.
A basic tenant of eavesdropping and code breaking is you want the people you are spying on to think their communication channel is secure so they will share juicy secrets with you. If they read these stories about how the FBI has a backdoor in VoIP it just ensures they wont say anything sensitive over a VoIP channel or if they do there will be a second layer of obfuscation or encryption at play.
I can see the FBI wanting the backdoor but you would think they wouldn't want to advertise it. The only thing they accomplish with this approach is they catch people who are dumb enough to use a known insecure comm channel, or you are denying criminals and terrorist VoIP as a comm channel or at least if they use it they have to add a second layer of encryption. The only other thing they accomplish is they scare and intimidate the general public which they seem to be doing quite well. Maybe its just another tool to train everyone to be good sheep and keep their mouths shut at all times.
If I were the NSA or FBI what I would do is design a crypto package, let's call it PGP for example, that had a very subtle and very hard to spot back door in it. I would then get some people to release it to the world as a supposedly secure way to defeat NSA eavesdropping. I would persecute the people who release it just enough to make it look like I was unhappy about it and unable to break it, but I'd make sure it was widely distributed and used, and in particular used by people who need to communicate things they want to hide from the NSA. I would then sit back and rake in all these nuggets from all the people who thought that if they just encrypted their secrets they would be private.
I think you need to recognize there is internal inconsistency in what you are saying. You seem to think you have a right to privacy in your communication to other people only if you have the technical prowess to defeat anyone trying to eavesdrop on it. What if you use that prowess to blow the whistle on wrong doing by someone like John Negroponte. Mr. Negroponte uses all the resource of his NSA to intercept and crack your encryption, read your message, takes umbrage and sends a rendition team to make you disappear. Did you have a right to privacy and to not have Mr. Negroponte read your mail, or are you to blame for not using sufficiently powerful encryption to defend yourself. You see you have no clue what the NSA can crack and what they can't. Me I would prefer governments are disallowed from eavesdropping at all, by law, instead of having to engage in a crypto arms race with them to defend my privacy,
I would also prefer to not be placed under suspicion of wrong doing by the mere act of using strong encryption to defend my privacy, and that is the other edge of this sword.
I'm of the school of thought that governments shouldn't be eavesdropping on its citizens communications at all. It may mean a criminal or a terrorist gets away but that is a small price to pay to prevent abuse of power by government.
The essence of Roe v Wade and why the right to privacy decided it is that until the baby is born it is the mother's, and to a lesser extent the father's, right to choose the fate of their genetic material, NOT YOU. I'm certainly willing to concede that late term abortions are an undesirable thing, but its completely insane to attribute living being status to a fertilized egg. It is genetic material, there is plenty more where that came from. There is no shortage of babies on this planet, many of whom can't be fed, why not worry about them instead of the ones who aren't born yet. Mandating birth follow from every act of sex was perhaps acceptable a few hundred years ago when the planet was empty. With todays' overpopulation its suicidal or maybe the better word is genocidal to compell population explosion based on religious zealotry.
To me the beauty of the right to privacy and Roe V. Wade is that is says YOU get to decide the fate of YOUR genetic material. If you consider a fertilized egg as life then its your prerogative to not abort the product of your loins. This means, for example, the government can't force you to abort a child or have only one child as China did. But it also means YOU can't inflict your religious views on someone else and tell them they have to carry every fertilized egg to birth, or that they can't use birth control. Its none of your business if someone else doesn't want to bring a child in to this overcrowded world. Children should be born in to families that want them.
You should try reading Freakonimics. It draws a strong correlation between unwanted pregnancies, the legalization of abortion and the current plunging crime rate in the U.S. Many criminals are products of homes where they were either unwanted or where their parents lacked the means to raise them properly. Abortion led to a dramatic drop in unwanted kids who couldn't be raised properly, and it may be why the crime rate is dropping now.
Any right you think you have and you think the Constitution affords you is history the day the Supreme Court votes 5-4 and says you don't.
Unfortunately the Constitution and the Republic, while ingenious in many respects, was known by the founding fathers to be highly fallible. In particular the one thing you couldn't prevent in a representative Democracy, is that the majority of voters would devolve in to ignorance, and be blinded by fear mongering and propaganda so they do stupid things and vote for bad people. Those bad people in turn pass bad laws and pack the courts with bad people who can then shred every thing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights stood for, and with ease too.
"I'm just curious, how are you defining "Fascism?""
Authoritarian capitalism, police state, no due process, dominated by one party which suffocates all opposition. It maintains a facade of capitalism which differentiates it from Communism and authoritarian socialism. However rather than free markets the government and the party dominates all aspects of economic life that matter, and in particular intervene in economic affairs whenever it benefits and enriches favored party members.
A penchant for militarism and aggressive warfare to gain its objectives. Massive investment in armaments and the willingness to use them to dominate its allies and enemies alike.
Fear mongering to make the population pliant to manipulation and control by the party. It was a classic technique perfected in Nazi Germany. The Nazi's version of 9/11 was the Reichstag fire. Its likely the Nazi's burned it but they framed a naked, mentally ill communist for it, and used it as justification for seizing power in face of an imminent "threat" form the Communists and the Jews.
Fascist states are defined by being rabidly anticommunist, which has defined the U.S. for the last century. In the 1930's many Americans were very supportive of Nazi Germany because both Germany and the U.S. were staunchly anti Soviet. George W.'s grandfather Prescott was the U.S. banker for the Thyssen family, one of Germany's richest which helped bankroll Hitlers rise to power. His Union Banking assets were seized for trading with the enemy when the U.S. declared war. Most of the 3rd world dictators we suppored in the twentieth century were Fascist regimes too, they were people we installed who were willing to kill socialist and communists indiscriminately. This gets back to Negropontes role in building right wing death squads in Central America as the U.S. waged a secret war against Socialism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
The U.S. is a somewhat benign form of Fascism, it does maintain a pretense of free elections but they are looking less free every iteration. If the Republican's retain their grip on power in 2006 and certainly by 2008 by suckering the electorate, exploiting a crisis(real or fabricated), rigging elections I don't think there will be much doubt this will be a Fascist state for a long time. One can only hope that Americans are becoming sufficiently disgusted with one party rule that they throw the Republicans out of a branch or two. If they don't basic liberties in this country are in real peril. I don't want the Democrats to have power either, since they are barely distinguishable for Republicans these days, a nice grid lock is desirable at present when both options are horrendously bad. The Republicans have engaged in such an effective and savage propaganda campaign against the Dems I'm not sure the Dems will gain control of anything. If the Republicans have a few more years to pack the courts that will finish the process of seizing power.
Nice unverifiable electronic voting will be a great tool for maintaining the pretense of free elections when they are in fact rigged.
The U.S. does still have due process most of the time but Little George has managed to set precedent for completely eviscerating it with Jose Padilla among others. If you don't have due process all the time for all citizens you don't really have it at all. Right now we only have it when its convenient for the White House and until they fabricate a terrorism charge against you which they apparently never have to prove in court.
The U.S. is building an all powerful combined police force, domestic, and foreign spying capacity that would be the envy of the Gestapo or KGB, under John Negroponte, a right wing Machiavellian if ever there was one. Imagine if the Gestapo only had computers and spy satellites.
The U.S. is, through the rendition program, seizing people at will anywhere on the globe, and sending them in to torture chambers around the globe. Sure sounds a lot like the Gestapo to me, except t
"There's only a debate if you don't know how to read."
How about this for a deal, I'll learn to read if you learn to write.
This statement is best described as ambiguous. You might be saying if I knew how to read I would understand that there is no right to privacy, or you might be saying if I could read I would know there is an indisputable right to privacy.
If you read the link I provided or you watched the confirmation hearing for Chief Justice Roberts on CSPAN, you would understand there is a huge debate over whether there is a right to privacy and what its bounds are. The Supreme Court has decided both ways on whether wire tapping violates our Constitution or our right to privacy, ergo there IS a debate.
Me personally I hope there is such a right and our courts will uphold it and slap down all the politicians, law enforcement officers and bureaucrats who want to usurp it using fear mongering. Unfortunately we live in a complex society. There are no inalienable rights that we can take as a given. The only rights we have are the ones we successfully fight to preserve. If we let a group of people seize control of the White House and Congress who have no regard for the rights of individuals and who are power mad, they can stack the courts to their liking and they can do whatever they feel like with our rights.
"Next overrated troll."
Next anonymous coward who can't make a coherent argument and who resorts to ad hominem attacks instead. Why don't you try making a coherent argument next time.