With all the buzz about virtual machines, why not take the Windows operating systems that they use right now and install them in a VM that runs inside of linux? You get linux networking, security, and stability, all while being able to snapshot copies of Windows VMs, have a much more standardized VM than you ever could a workstation.
To put it in terms any CIO could get behind: "Why don't we leverage the capital investment that we already have in our existing IT solution by migrating our systems to a financially viable and historically stable platform while still running our legacy enterprise applications?"
Depends on the country how they feel about it, I suppose. But, renouncing your citizenship is not really about asking the country to not consider you as a citizen, its about telling the country that you no longer consider yourself one and allowing them to update their records, etc. In some countries it's fairly easy. IIRC (from the US passport) in the United States, it's as easy as telling any member of the state department that you renouce your citizenship.
When the government disallows a deal involving a large financial incentive to a company in exchange for acting in the interests of the party offering the money, I'm pretty sure you can safely call that dirty.
I think that making up things to supposedly explain other things we don't know the answer for is a much poorer choice than waiting to see if we can actually figure out an answer from objective facts. That accounts for all evidence-free postulates that are by their very nature untestable. The concept of god or gods is one of these.
I agree completely. I was proposing not to make things up, but rather to correct the (to me and I imagine you would agree) obvious mis-usage of the term 'god'. I was musing about the possibilities of re-defining the term god such that it is defined as the beliefs that we scientists hold as true. The fact that this would quasi-qualify the resulting product as a religion is not the goal, however this would be a side affect and the resulting product would likely be much less objectionable to those still using the incorrect definition of god. I agree that the opinion of those people has a negligible affect on my life, however there are a lot of them and they have a large influence on the present and future, so this would be benifical to the people of the resulting group.
Further, I think that the opinion of those who make things up and then follow them isn't all that important to me, certainly not important enough for me to make up, or take up, any collection of ideas and call them "god." [...] Science - both the method and the resulting body of knowledge - appeals to me because I see it as also confidence based; it uses interlocking confidences to build a structure of remarkable usefulness and resilience, in my view. It is willing to, even designed to, completely reset those confidence values when needed. My reaction to perceiving that resilience, along with its ability to change according to the logical dictates of objective fact, is that of having found something that operates just the way I always imagined learning should work.
I agree completely with that as well. This concept that I am talking about is still something that is difficult to wrap my head around, and I blame the theists that have deeply ingrained the concept of god with the idea of a fairy-tale person who overlooks the world. However, I am not proposing that someone like you, whos views seem to be very similar and agreeable to my own, would have to change what you believe in or to take up a belief in new things. Rather, it would be a conceptual and significant change in how one thinks about the concept of 'god'. Science is very powerful in that is is adaptive to new information, and the method provides for a logical progression in our knowledge. I am positing that this force is so powerful, one could say that it, being based on the rules of logic and the rules of mathmatics, is eternal. Math certainly seems to be based in the conceptual and the eternal, as does formal logic. So, why not discard the ancient ideal that 'god' is a person, or a sentient force, or a being that loves cows? Why not determine that god _is_ the knowledge that is revealed to us through the scientific method? God could be nothing more than the rules of the universe and of logic. In this way one could harness the obviously very powerful 'devotion' inspired by religion while at the same time educating those that are converted into using the scientific method and logical reasoning.
Waaay off topic, but I want to know what you think about this... I'm a die-hard atheist, but after reading some of the 16-18th century philosophy (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel), which interestingly enough was in a political philosophy course, I've begun to start considering something... Before it was bastardized by Christianity, gods were just eternal things. Most civilizations personified the idea for some reason, but does it have to be that way?
Spinoza had the view that the universe and gravity were 'god', because one could see that gravity (and similar physical forces) were eternal and had the most significant and constant influence on reality.
Given that, I've started to wonder if I'm an atheist for the sole reason that I let Christians pollute the definition of 'god' until they came up with a God (complete with human egotism and a fanciful afterlife...) that I could never begin to believe in. So, if I can define 'god', for myself, as simply a force that is eternal and shapes reality, am I an atheist or just a religious person that is very much not Christian?
It's beginning to seem to me like atheism, to most of the non-atheist public and some of the relativist and/or amoral atheists, implies that nothing is eternal. That's not what most intelligent atheists I've talked to believe in, they just don't believe in a being as a god or an afterlife, but they do believe in the eternal rule of physics and the like.
So, here's a question for you (and other readers)... If we atheists were to simply define othe physical laws and the rules of logic (which is not physical, but concrete and unchangable none the less. It's interesting to think about exactly why logic works the way it does, and the answer that I've come to every time is that it is the way it is simply because it has to be, which is rather god-like really... but I digress), if we were to define these concepts as our god, and science as the rational search for knowledge of what god truly is, and rational ethics as the code by which our god requires or prefers us to live by, what would happen? Is that agreeable to some? If a large group did that, in one blow we'd be saying to the world that we are just as valid of a group as any other.
Maybe you elder folk can give your opinion on what an undergraduate senior in Computer Science (me) thinks the trend will be. I'm curious to see what the/. community thinks of this, but personally I can't see any better theoretical botnet engine, so I believe it's inevitable.
Now that AMD and Intel both have visualization hardware built into the CPU, and with AMD planning to (and I imagine Intel is either already planning to or will follow suit) add the IOMMU into the CPU, isn't that the perfect control vector? For the unfamiliar, the IOMMU is the input/output memory management unit, which will handle the task of mapping a piece of hardware's DMA to actual memory. This has been the barrier that prevents vanilla DMA hardware drivers (notably video cards, can't wait for virtualized games and no more booting Windows!) from being used in a virtual machine, because the overhead of doing this mapping in software destroys the usefulness of DMA.
So, once it is possible for an operating system installed on an actual computer to run in a virtual machine using all the same drivers, how long will it be before we see the hypervisor rootkit? A trojan could theoretically set itself up to virtualize the computer's OS and then have absolute control over the machine while being outside of the reach of any anti-virus/monitoring program on the machine. You'd need to boot from other media to see that the filesystem has changed (and with some clever BIOS flashing, couldn't one make it so that even this didn't work? I'd hate to think of the day when a trojan requires manual re-flashing to remove...) and one wouldn't be able to see the extra internet traffic unless the uplink/router was watching for it.
What do you guys think? In a separate, completely and totally unrelated matter, I'm looking for 5-7 programmers that have low ethical standards and a high desire for illicitly gained power. Any takers?
I don't know why everyone continually seems surprised by Google becoming more like Microsoft. Ethics aside, Microsoft is insanely profitable. One would do well to not forget that, since the IPO, Google is a publicly traded corporation. If the CEO of Google _didn't_ try to 'maximize shareholder returns' aka 'profit at all costs', then the CEO would not only be likely to be fired but could also be held financially responsible for not pursuing the shareholder's interests.
Microsoft didn't happen in a vacuum. It was and is a product of the corporate goal of only serving the interests of the shareholder, and I'd bet money (or stock!) that Google is destined for similar places. "Do no evil" was good and all, but now if Google's executive stance is anything but "make more profit" then they are legally liable for it and must explain to the shareholders why they were 'fiscally irresponsible in the pursuit of shareholder value and return'.
You're right. The grandparent might be wondering what happened to his brilliant legal career, but I'm not.
Bottom line -- it doesn't matter why he did it, it only matters what he did. We don't go easier on defendants who murder someone because they were only trying to keep everyone from finding out about their secret extramarital love affair.
Nor do I wonder about your legal career. Not to be too much of an ass, but since we're apparently judging poster's legal knowledge in this particular thread... Intent is a very real consideration at trial. It's always present in the sentencing, and often present in the deciding of guilt... There's a reason manslaughter and murder are different charges. In the joyriding example, you don't distinguish taking the guilty party's intent into account at sentencing from taking intent into account as part of the legal burden of proving guilt.
Am I the only one who got a chill when reading the following:
If you're crafting an argument for public consumption, you could even have HIT workers build up your argument for you -- start with a position and have them come up with reasons supporting that position -- although to me that feels like a cheapening of the debate process that crosses the line, because you're not even trying to reason your way to a conclusion, instead starting with the conclusion you want and then working backwards (not that this isn't what a lot of debaters do anyway!).
That seems like a perfect application of this "pay a lot of people a little money each to do something" technology. Mix this approach in with a little statistical knowledge, a little marketing research insight, etc, and you'd have a process which takes an arbitrary conclusion as input and produces an argument that a statistical percent of the population is going to agree with as output. Not only will that X% agree with it, but some Y% of the X% will feel like there's something about that argument (or arguer) that really summed up how they always felt about the issue but only now could put into words. The really chilling aspect is that both X and Y are just a function of how many 'turks' wrote up an argument (which is itself just a function of how much money was poured into the process.)
I know focus groups and market research has been used before, but imagine using the internet to give micropayments to a massive amount of people to not just give their opinion on an issue but to give an argument that has been crafted from their individual beliefs. If a politician can't find a way to turn that into a generalized position that the majority of any given populous agrees with, then they're not working hard enough...
Hint: it might be a crime for a US citizen to advocate taking up arms against his government. It might be called treason.
In reality, you'd probably end up wishing that what the gov't called it was treason. The trend is clear; a person who is resisting, advocating resistance, or doing anything contrary to the will of the State is a terrorist. Terrorists are not to be considered human, and it's expected that any action that involves the treatment of the terrorist is not only acceptable, but it will not even be questioned.
The first step to oppressing a people is to stop believing that they are human. That's why they're called insurgents, which is defined in Webster's as "a rebel not recognized as a belligerent" (with belligerent meaning "belonging to or recognized... protected by and subject to the laws of war"). That's why terrorist is not well defined and is used in a manner unlike other terminology. A 'soldier' has a particular job and description, and thus can be separated into 'infantry', 'Marines', 'scout', etc. A 'terrorist' is a descriptive term that implies there is nothing more that can be said. There's no type of terrorism mentioned. No one is defining the political change that terrorism is being used for. FFS, we live in a time where "they are terrorists, think of what unnamable things that 'terrorists' would do to you if they got a chance" is a valid justification of torturing them and imprisoning them without trial or charges.
Of course, that's also why the people who live in the USA are 'consumers', not people. I was at a party last night; it was not an extremely large gathering, there was drinking but no noise problems, and there was nothing disruptive about it. 4 police cars pull up, no less than 6 officers get out and talk amongst themselves. 2 of them walk up to the entryway to a patio (clearly belonging to the apartment). I ask what the problem is, and (non-belligerently) tell them that this is private property and that they're not welcome. One of the officers looks at me, and says (direct quote) "What are you going to do about it?" and walks into the patio area and begins questioning and demanding ID from everyone in sight. (Everyone was over 21.) We're losing this battle rapidly, and the trends in other areas work against us.
And when they ask you for your key and you won't give them, they throw you in jail and keep you there.
Right, this is absolutely true. However, it doesn't matter a bit, because let's look at how encryption has changed the equation...
Situation 1 - No encryption. This offers no protection whatsoever, except for the 'small fish in a big pond' situation which may or may not be true. Your e-mails can (and will) be monitored, most likely not individually but by automated process. Computer programs will be able to data mine/archive/print out and send to your grandmother/etc absolutely all of your e-mail communications with nothing in the way. Everyone from the 14 year old next door who's leet-in-training and discovered you didn't change your Linksys password to the TLAs can do what they like with your communications and you will not be aware or able to detect it.
Situation 2 - With encryption. Automated monitoring is right out, your communications are nothing but gibberish and all that can be determined is 'there was a mail from A to B, it was encrypted'. This may get you tagged as a person of interest, but the odds are against it. The more people that use encryption to hide boring communications, the less interesting encryption makes communications. You are no longer 'a small fish in a big pond' but 'a possible fish in a medium-sized pond'. Absolutely no one except the holder of the private key you've encrypted to can read the communications (flawed algorithms and quantum computing aside, the purpose of encrypting never was to guarantee secrecy forever anyway and quantum computing is still a ways off). If a government agency decides that it's likely they have an interest in knowing what you've written in that e-mail (which they had to have done by virtue of who it was to or other outside information), they must _contact you_ and _ask_ you (or the other party) to reveal the communications. This is either done with a search warrant or with illegal coercion. If you had been discussing your various drug deals, then you're boned and you probably should be because they knew you were doing it without reading that e-mail and now they're just building a case. If it's just legitimate communications, you reveal the message and they learn a lesson (maybe) from the time and money they wasted. If it's so secret that prison is not as bad as the consequences of revealing the message, you go to prison, secure in the knowledge that the e-mail is safe for X years (X depending on key size and method, and whether party B cracks).
What's the difference? If the gov't really wants to know, and you don't want to go to jail, then they still end up knowing. But they had to _ask_ through _legitimate_ channels. The difference is in the power that you have over the secrecy of your data. In situation 1 you have no power whatsoever. In situation 2, you (and the other party) have absolute power, and can even go to jail to protect the secrecy of the data.
Unless you're talking to your tech-impaired grandmother, why would you not want control over the flow of your communications?
(An un-related side note: Is the slashdot captcha _always_ 'ferocity', or is that just my own personal word?)
I used to work at an H.H. Gregg (southeastern regional consumer electronics/appliances), and we put Best Buy and Circuit City to shame. Every single month, 15% of your net sales _had_ to be extended warranties (though we called them MSEs or some crap). If you didn't hit that goal, 1st month you get a warning. Second month, you get fired. No questions, it was made clear that they'd terminate the best salesman there if he didn't hit his numbers. Talk about pushing people to buy crap, the store honors and jokes always went to the guy who sold a $50 warranty on a $100 VCR...
True, but that assumes a great number of things about the integrity of the computer. In order to verify the download, the correct certificate authority keys must exist, and the computer must already have the correct microsoft keys. It would be much more technically feasible to have an attack vector that lacks the ability to run arbitrary code, but has access to modify non-executable memory, and thus can change the microsoft public key in memory to the microshaft public key immediately prior to issuing the update command. It's still not easy, but digital signatures are only as secure as the memory they're stored in.
First, see my response to the other guy's comment RE the post office analogy, and motivations for signing up for the army in general.
Second, don't be so hasty to throw out the idea that someone has to be stupid not to know what an army is used for. You don't.
I agree if you meant that the commander in cheif was/is/is still being stupid for mis-using our army, but the armed forces are not only there to 'fight wars'.
While I don't agree with the war at all, saying the fact that they signed up for a job that could possibly entail (to be fair, some troops in Iraq were troops before the war, and some troops in the armed forces are not in Iraq at the moment, both of which go to show that being in the military does not always entail killing) is grounds to say 'fuck em' is a bit harsh.
I will grant that _some_ people in the armed forces signed up to kill people. That's the case with any country's military. That will continue to be the case until that far off day arrives when we can live in a Kantian perpetually peaceful society, if that ever occurs.
However, some (much more than the former type, I'd wager) of the troops signed up for the armed forces out of a sense of duty to the country. Others are poorly educated and felt that the military was the only place they could go to get themselves into shape and make something out of themselves. Others have a long line of military fathers, and they felt a duty to both family and country.
My analogy to the postman was not intended to liken delivering packages to delivering bullets. I was merely trying to point out that one ought to keep a clear distinction between the general purpose, the orders and the person. The general purpose of our armed forces is to prevent other countries from interfering with the sovereignty of the United States. That is honorable, justified, and required. The orders are to invade Iraq and attempt to enforce our view of 'a proper government' upon them. That's dispicable, illogical, and seems more and more corrupt as time goes by. Fuck the war. The person, however, is a fellow citizen doing what the person feels is right and is owed to the country.
...and I have no problem saying that the people who signed up out of bloodlust are getting what they asked for. I know some people in the Army like that. (I'm not in the army, i knew them before they left.) But I also know some people who are genuinely good people that feel it's their civic duty.
Blaming a US soldier serving in Iraq for Iraq war would be like blaming a Mafia thug for helping enable the crimes of Mafia. US doesn't have conscription, but a voluntary for-pay army. If you choose to take money from it in order to help it in its activities, of your own free will and under no coercion, then of course you can be blamed for taking part in said activities. Why on Earth would US soldiers be exempt from being held accountable for their choices ?
Read what you said again. If one chooses to help the army of their country for pay as an act of free will, of course they should be held accountable for their actions. You say this in the context of blaming a US soldier for the Iraq war. The problem is that the US soldier chose to serve his country, NOT to attack Iraq. Had the US soldier signed up for the "let's invade Iraq on false pretenses" club, then yes, blame the soldier for doing so.
By your logic, lets also blame postal workers for delivering mail bombs and anthrax. If they signed up to deliver packages, of course they should be liable for the packages they deliver. Or perhaps we should look deeper and realize that they didn't sign up to deliver THAT package, they signed up to deliver packages.
This is a thread for anyone who might be interested in contributing to this project in any fashion. If we actually can put together a team of people willing to do this project for X dollars, finding people interested in this product shouldn't be terribly difficult.
Overall goal - Develop a system that can be deployed on as many existing POS machines (that are at least able to do general computations, i.e. not embedded POS only hardware) that uses a standard format for storing customer, transactional, etc, data. This would provide a strong foundation for sales-reporting, statistical, etc, use. A standard 'sales info' format would do a great deal of good when it comes to providing choices for POS solutions.
I'm a senior in computer science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I have also thought that the current crop of POS software is shabby at best. Most of the POS systems already run on general purpose computers, so it would be ideal if it was possible to have a lightweight system to use this hardware. A complete system would be a distribution capable of running at a number of levels. Here's my idea of what the levels and their goals could be. Every level would be configured to be able to interoperate with other POS machines (both those from within the project and from outside, facilitated by a published communications protocol)
Very low resource POS terminal - This would be the mode intended for an ancient machine that still is able to run linux. It would be a console (text only) interface with the goal of a no-frills functional (but still easier on the eyes and easier to use than first generation POS consoles) POS machine that could be stand alone or networked.
Mid level graphical - A lower resource version of the next level, with some eye candy and other intensive features removed. Would most likely be the most commonly used.
Full performance graphical - Runs a graphical interface that takes advantage of all available resources. The overwhelming majority of PCs could support this.
Server station - May also act as a POS station. Coordinates the activities of any number (scalable to redundant multiple stations if there's need) of POS stations, coordinates the storing of POS data into databases, enforcing policy for POS stations, etc. A central point of control for monitoring real-time activity, controlling stations, etc.
Dumb frontend - A station that does not need to be directly connected to any hardware, but rather uses server-supplied resources. I.E. a dumb touchscreen could be a frontend, while the credit card reader and reciept printer connected to it are actually connected to the server, though this is transparent to the user.
Communications between devices can be secured via public key protocols: a key stored on the harddrive, or a smartcard stored inserted in a reader, possibly with the reader housed inside the PC case for tamper resisitance. Employee permissions could be controlled in any manner that PC security is handled: smart card, password (not recommended), biometric, etc.
You're either a deliberate plant or actually just ideologically challenged, so let me illustrate a few truths to you. I'll start with what you said, move on to what the law says, and finally interject what it is that I have to say. (Looking back, I've fucked it all up by interjecting my comments, but here's the general flow.)
What you said -
it says things about Habeas Corpus such as, "which the Republican Congress revoked", [...] we don't have a Republican Congress anymore, so I'm not sure how that is even meaningful.
Fact - The Military Commisions Act of 2006 was passed by a Republican Congress. Even if they got kicked out shortly afterwards, it's still relevant to consider the group of trai^h^h^h^h congressmen that passed it. Next.
Habeas Corpus was not suspended in any way, shape, or form. The Military Commissions Act does not apply to US citizens, permanent residents, or persons with a valid legal status within the United States.
Fact - Whether or not the law sets guidelines that apply to US Citizens (the point which you are presumably mistakenly trying to argue), it is US LAW and does in fact apply to US CITIZENS. Arguably, that is the _only_ group of people it applies to, as it is rediculous to imagine a US Citizen bound by Canadian law and so forth. US Code = Law for US Citizens.
Only US citizens have a right to Habeas Corpus (Gonzales' ridiculous statements on the issue aside).
Where to begin... 1. Habeas Corpus was first referenced in writing in 1305 by King Edward I. It was first passed into law by an act of English parliment in 1679. As such, it's been around a hell of a lot longer than many of the 'fundamental rights' that you commonly acknowledge (assuming you do in fact acknowledge the existance of a 'fundamental' right). 2. Gonzales was not making some off-handed personal remark on the issue. He was speaking in his capacity of the lawyer for the United States. His words were the expression of the will of the United States executive branch.
The argument that Habeas Corpus needs to apply to literally everyone because otherwise there is no way to "prove" that you are a US citizen to which MCA doesn't apply is something of a curious one. [...] If you believe the authorities will ignore the fact that someone is a US citizen and detain them anyway, then there are larger fundamental issues than whether or not someone can challenge detention
I hate to be the one to mention Jose Padilla, but he was a case of a US citizen on US soil that was apprehended and treated as an 'enemy combatant'. The problem is not that this will magically cause the US gov't to now do this. As historical facts have shown, the US _will_ do this in at least a certain subset of cases. The problem is that this gives the US gov't resource to do this AND to not have public review of the facts. Certainly, the US Gov't would not break into a television station and apprehend someone who is currently displaying their US passport on national television. That's not the gov't abuse _I'm_ worried about. The problem is when a person in the government, likely without the explicit permission or knowledge of their superiors, issues an order to "apprehend the alien who is currently located at 124 Pine St. What? No, this isn't a US Citizen, it's an illegal alien with forged paperwork. I've done the research, your job is not to look up citizen records, that's my job. Go apprehend the terrorist!" Before, the idea was that in this case the prisoner could request a writ be heard, and the fact that we grant writs of habeas corpus would be all the evidence needed for an observer to recognize that, if this person's writ isn't being considered at all, there may be a problem here. Right, it's _not_ perfect. It _is_ abusable. However, this new anti-terrorist (tm) legislation means that in the above situation it would be completely accepta
Careful with those absolutes. At a base level, the baby is forming a neural pattern that identifies to the physical ball, yes, but what are those formed _from_? The patterns are formed from the physical sensory input and the emotional visceral input. We have a fairly good idea what the baby is seeing (or from the perspective of reading the adult's mind, what the adult saw as a baby) when he looks at the ball. We have a potentially huge database of information as to what other individuals comprehended the ball as, and if it's a big issue we can observe a baby in controlled conditions looking at a ball for the first time.
There was an interesting article in July in Scientific American. Researchers took mice and subjected them to startling events, and compared the patterns. They had very interesting results, I strongly recommend the article. Although the idea that memories and perception might be represented by neural populations is not new, we think we have the first experimental data that reveal how such information is actually organized within the neural population. The brain relies on memory-coding cliques to record and extract different features of the same event, and it essentially arranges the information relating to a given event into a pyramid whose levels are arranged hierarchically, from the most general, abstract features to the most specific aspects.... Our work with mice also yielded a way for us to compare patterns from one brain to another--and even to pass information from a brain to a computer. Using a mathematical treatment called matrix inversion, we were able to translate the activities of neural clique assemblies into a string of binary code, where 1 represents an active state and 0 represents an inactive state for each coding unit within a given assembly we examined. For example, the memory of an earthquake might be recorded as "11001," where the first 1 represents activation of the general startle clique, the second 1 represents activation of the clique that responds to a motion disturbance, the first 0 indicates lack of activity in the air-puff clique, the second 0 indicates lack of activity in the elevator-drop clique and the final 1 shows activation of the earthquake clique. We have applied a similar binary code to the neural ensemble activity from four different mice and were able to predict, with up to 99 percent accuracy, which event they had experienced and where it had happened. In other words, by scanning the binary code we could read and compare the animals' minds mathematically.
Swarm of UAVs for surveillance of hostile (and friendly?) countries. UAVs work together to accomplish goals such as "make sure there is a flyover of areas X Y and Z every 10 minutes", "keep a unit no less than 5 minutes away from this location", "keep 20 units in the airspace, but make sure each unit charges to at least 40% at all times."
Just imagine the effort it would take to continually watch even a small percentage of the population at any given time. Not to mention, effective surveillance would require people to do the watching (not just machines) and word would get out about it, no matter how oppressive the regime.
Right. The only way a state or other entity could possibly afford to take on a project as ambitious as 'watch everyone everywhere at all times' would be to find some way to get massive amounts of funding and support. It would also require a large amount of research into the fields of pattern recognition (neural nets for facial and behavioral recognition). You'd almost have to find a large amount of very wealthy people and convince them that it would be in their best interests to finance the project for you.
Thank god that China Security and Surveillance Technology and China Public Security Technology, two companies that have the goal of doing just that are now listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYTimes Linky). During the period from April 2006 to April 2007, $164.2 million dollars has been invested in the China Security and Surveillance Technology company by US investment groups.
From the article:
Hedge fund money from the United States has paid for the development of not just better video cameras, but face-recognition software and even newer behavior-recognition software designed to spot the beginnings of a street protest and notify police. [...]
his company's software made it possible for security cameras to count the number of people in crosswalks and alert the police if a crowd forms at an unusual hour, a possible sign of an unsanctioned protest.
China Security and Surveillance is involved in some of the most controversial areas of public security. [...] one of the company's growth areas involved surveillance systems for Internet cafes; the government is trying to clamp down on users of the cafes in order to discourage pornography and prostitution.
In Shenzhen, white poles resembling street lights now line the roads every block or two, ready to be fitted with cameras. In a nondescript building linked to nearby street cameras, a desktop computer displayed streaming video images from outside and drew a green square around each face to check it against a "blacklist."
But hey, maybe, after they've done all the hard work of researching and field testing the equipment, us Westerners can buy a few of the systems off of them cheap. After technology like this has been developed and tested, what up-with-the-times state wouldn't want a few of these lying around for 'social stability.'
I, for one, welcome our new bought-and-paid-for overlords.
If network neutrality is not upheld, this will have a disastrous effect on the market for Internet services. Service companies that rely on advertising or other revenue not directly taken from the consumer are currently operating on the basis that they are paying for bandwidth they use, therefore they pay in proportion to the amount of people that visit. This has the effect of allowing very small services and companies on the internet, which will effectively be barred from competing if ISPs are able to throttle consumer's connection speeds and ability to connect to these services on condition that the service provider itself pay. This effectively raises the barrier to entry in the service providing market to an arbitrarily high limit, one which is determined only by the market practices of ISPs in every area the service provider wishes to serve.
This would, in effect, require every service provider to do extensive, and expensive, research to determine which geographical market area they wish to provide service to, which diminishes competition in the service providing market by limiting any given service provider to operate only in the areas that the service provider can afford or otherwise provide for agreements with ISPs.
Some will say that no network neutrality will spur the ISP market by causing new demands for ISPs that do not throttle connection speeds, however this is dependent on the public knowledge of exactly what is going on behind the scenes. This has the effect of raising the barrier to entry of the ISP business, as any new business that seeks to benefit by offering un-throttled connections would first have to either take on the expense of educating the market that they wish to serve or to only serve a market which is already aware of the difference.
As both of these effects raise the barrier to entry of Internet related markets, and serve to benefit large established companies at the expense of smaller ones, it is not in the public interest to allow ISPs to classify traffic based on arbitrary conditions such as those that would be dependent on which service provider a consumer is communicating with.
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With all the buzz about virtual machines, why not take the Windows operating systems that they use right now and install them in a VM that runs inside of linux? You get linux networking, security, and stability, all while being able to snapshot copies of Windows VMs, have a much more standardized VM than you ever could a workstation.
To put it in terms any CIO could get behind: "Why don't we leverage the capital investment that we already have in our existing IT solution by migrating our systems to a financially viable and historically stable platform while still running our legacy enterprise applications?"
Depends on the country how they feel about it, I suppose. But, renouncing your citizenship is not really about asking the country to not consider you as a citizen, its about telling the country that you no longer consider yourself one and allowing them to update their records, etc. In some countries it's fairly easy. IIRC (from the US passport) in the United States, it's as easy as telling any member of the state department that you renouce your citizenship.
While that sounds not unreasonable I have to ask... WHAT resources? What have we actually gotten out it? Nothing that I can see.
Oh, I'm sorry, did you think we wanted resources for everyone? No no no, that's not how we do things here.
Plus, if you have an active account, Facebook will let you remove tags of yourself from anything...
When the government disallows a deal involving a large financial incentive to a company in exchange for acting in the interests of the party offering the money, I'm pretty sure you can safely call that dirty.
I agree completely. I was proposing not to make things up, but rather to correct the (to me and I imagine you would agree) obvious mis-usage of the term 'god'. I was musing about the possibilities of re-defining the term god such that it is defined as the beliefs that we scientists hold as true. The fact that this would quasi-qualify the resulting product as a religion is not the goal, however this would be a side affect and the resulting product would likely be much less objectionable to those still using the incorrect definition of god. I agree that the opinion of those people has a negligible affect on my life, however there are a lot of them and they have a large influence on the present and future, so this would be benifical to the people of the resulting group.
Further, I think that the opinion of those who make things up and then follow them isn't all that important to me, certainly not important enough for me to make up, or take up, any collection of ideas and call them "god." [...] Science - both the method and the resulting body of knowledge - appeals to me because I see it as also confidence based; it uses interlocking confidences to build a structure of remarkable usefulness and resilience, in my view. It is willing to, even designed to, completely reset those confidence values when needed. My reaction to perceiving that resilience, along with its ability to change according to the logical dictates of objective fact, is that of having found something that operates just the way I always imagined learning should work.
I agree completely with that as well. This concept that I am talking about is still something that is difficult to wrap my head around, and I blame the theists that have deeply ingrained the concept of god with the idea of a fairy-tale person who overlooks the world. However, I am not proposing that someone like you, whos views seem to be very similar and agreeable to my own, would have to change what you believe in or to take up a belief in new things. Rather, it would be a conceptual and significant change in how one thinks about the concept of 'god'. Science is very powerful in that is is adaptive to new information, and the method provides for a logical progression in our knowledge. I am positing that this force is so powerful, one could say that it, being based on the rules of logic and the rules of mathmatics, is eternal. Math certainly seems to be based in the conceptual and the eternal, as does formal logic. So, why not discard the ancient ideal that 'god' is a person, or a sentient force, or a being that loves cows? Why not determine that god _is_ the knowledge that is revealed to us through the scientific method? God could be nothing more than the rules of the universe and of logic. In this way one could harness the obviously very powerful 'devotion' inspired by religion while at the same time educating those that are converted into using the scientific method and logical reasoning.
Waaay off topic, but I want to know what you think about this... I'm a die-hard atheist, but after reading some of the 16-18th century philosophy (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel), which interestingly enough was in a political philosophy course, I've begun to start considering something... Before it was bastardized by Christianity, gods were just eternal things. Most civilizations personified the idea for some reason, but does it have to be that way?
Spinoza had the view that the universe and gravity were 'god', because one could see that gravity (and similar physical forces) were eternal and had the most significant and constant influence on reality.
Given that, I've started to wonder if I'm an atheist for the sole reason that I let Christians pollute the definition of 'god' until they came up with a God (complete with human egotism and a fanciful afterlife...) that I could never begin to believe in. So, if I can define 'god', for myself, as simply a force that is eternal and shapes reality, am I an atheist or just a religious person that is very much not Christian?
It's beginning to seem to me like atheism, to most of the non-atheist public and some of the relativist and/or amoral atheists, implies that nothing is eternal. That's not what most intelligent atheists I've talked to believe in, they just don't believe in a being as a god or an afterlife, but they do believe in the eternal rule of physics and the like.
So, here's a question for you (and other readers)... If we atheists were to simply define othe physical laws and the rules of logic (which is not physical, but concrete and unchangable none the less. It's interesting to think about exactly why logic works the way it does, and the answer that I've come to every time is that it is the way it is simply because it has to be, which is rather god-like really... but I digress), if we were to define these concepts as our god, and science as the rational search for knowledge of what god truly is, and rational ethics as the code by which our god requires or prefers us to live by, what would happen? Is that agreeable to some? If a large group did that, in one blow we'd be saying to the world that we are just as valid of a group as any other.
What do you think?
Maybe you elder folk can give your opinion on what an undergraduate senior in Computer Science (me) thinks the trend will be. I'm curious to see what the /. community thinks of this, but personally I can't see any better theoretical botnet engine, so I believe it's inevitable.
Now that AMD and Intel both have visualization hardware built into the CPU, and with AMD planning to (and I imagine Intel is either already planning to or will follow suit) add the IOMMU into the CPU, isn't that the perfect control vector? For the unfamiliar, the IOMMU is the input/output memory management unit, which will handle the task of mapping a piece of hardware's DMA to actual memory. This has been the barrier that prevents vanilla DMA hardware drivers (notably video cards, can't wait for virtualized games and no more booting Windows!) from being used in a virtual machine, because the overhead of doing this mapping in software destroys the usefulness of DMA.
So, once it is possible for an operating system installed on an actual computer to run in a virtual machine using all the same drivers, how long will it be before we see the hypervisor rootkit? A trojan could theoretically set itself up to virtualize the computer's OS and then have absolute control over the machine while being outside of the reach of any anti-virus/monitoring program on the machine. You'd need to boot from other media to see that the filesystem has changed (and with some clever BIOS flashing, couldn't one make it so that even this didn't work? I'd hate to think of the day when a trojan requires manual re-flashing to remove...) and one wouldn't be able to see the extra internet traffic unless the uplink/router was watching for it.
What do you guys think? In a separate, completely and totally unrelated matter, I'm looking for 5-7 programmers that have low ethical standards and a high desire for illicitly gained power. Any takers?
I don't know why everyone continually seems surprised by Google becoming more like Microsoft. Ethics aside, Microsoft is insanely profitable. One would do well to not forget that, since the IPO, Google is a publicly traded corporation. If the CEO of Google _didn't_ try to 'maximize shareholder returns' aka 'profit at all costs', then the CEO would not only be likely to be fired but could also be held financially responsible for not pursuing the shareholder's interests.
Microsoft didn't happen in a vacuum. It was and is a product of the corporate goal of only serving the interests of the shareholder, and I'd bet money (or stock!) that Google is destined for similar places. "Do no evil" was good and all, but now if Google's executive stance is anything but "make more profit" then they are legally liable for it and must explain to the shareholders why they were 'fiscally irresponsible in the pursuit of shareholder value and return'.
Nor do I wonder about your legal career. Not to be too much of an ass, but since we're apparently judging poster's legal knowledge in this particular thread... Intent is a very real consideration at trial. It's always present in the sentencing, and often present in the deciding of guilt... There's a reason manslaughter and murder are different charges. In the joyriding example, you don't distinguish taking the guilty party's intent into account at sentencing from taking intent into account as part of the legal burden of proving guilt.
Am I the only one who got a chill when reading the following:
If you're crafting an argument for public consumption, you could even have HIT workers build up your argument for you -- start with a position and have them come up with reasons supporting that position -- although to me that feels like a cheapening of the debate process that crosses the line, because you're not even trying to reason your way to a conclusion, instead starting with the conclusion you want and then working backwards (not that this isn't what a lot of debaters do anyway!).
That seems like a perfect application of this "pay a lot of people a little money each to do something" technology. Mix this approach in with a little statistical knowledge, a little marketing research insight, etc, and you'd have a process which takes an arbitrary conclusion as input and produces an argument that a statistical percent of the population is going to agree with as output. Not only will that X% agree with it, but some Y% of the X% will feel like there's something about that argument (or arguer) that really summed up how they always felt about the issue but only now could put into words. The really chilling aspect is that both X and Y are just a function of how many 'turks' wrote up an argument (which is itself just a function of how much money was poured into the process.)
I know focus groups and market research has been used before, but imagine using the internet to give micropayments to a massive amount of people to not just give their opinion on an issue but to give an argument that has been crafted from their individual beliefs. If a politician can't find a way to turn that into a generalized position that the majority of any given populous agrees with, then they're not working hard enough...
In reality, you'd probably end up wishing that what the gov't called it was treason. The trend is clear; a person who is resisting, advocating resistance, or doing anything contrary to the will of the State is a terrorist. Terrorists are not to be considered human, and it's expected that any action that involves the treatment of the terrorist is not only acceptable, but it will not even be questioned.
The first step to oppressing a people is to stop believing that they are human. That's why they're called insurgents, which is defined in Webster's as "a rebel not recognized as a belligerent" (with belligerent meaning "belonging to or recognized
Of course, that's also why the people who live in the USA are 'consumers', not people. I was at a party last night; it was not an extremely large gathering, there was drinking but no noise problems, and there was nothing disruptive about it. 4 police cars pull up, no less than 6 officers get out and talk amongst themselves. 2 of them walk up to the entryway to a patio (clearly belonging to the apartment). I ask what the problem is, and (non-belligerently) tell them that this is private property and that they're not welcome. One of the officers looks at me, and says (direct quote) "What are you going to do about it?" and walks into the patio area and begins questioning and demanding ID from everyone in sight. (Everyone was over 21.) We're losing this battle rapidly, and the trends in other areas work against us.
Freedom was nice while it lasted.
Right, this is absolutely true. However, it doesn't matter a bit, because let's look at how encryption has changed the equation...
Situation 1 - No encryption. This offers no protection whatsoever, except for the 'small fish in a big pond' situation which may or may not be true. Your e-mails can (and will) be monitored, most likely not individually but by automated process. Computer programs will be able to data mine/archive/print out and send to your grandmother/etc absolutely all of your e-mail communications with nothing in the way. Everyone from the 14 year old next door who's leet-in-training and discovered you didn't change your Linksys password to the TLAs can do what they like with your communications and you will not be aware or able to detect it.
Situation 2 - With encryption. Automated monitoring is right out, your communications are nothing but gibberish and all that can be determined is 'there was a mail from A to B, it was encrypted'. This may get you tagged as a person of interest, but the odds are against it. The more people that use encryption to hide boring communications, the less interesting encryption makes communications. You are no longer 'a small fish in a big pond' but 'a possible fish in a medium-sized pond'. Absolutely no one except the holder of the private key you've encrypted to can read the communications (flawed algorithms and quantum computing aside, the purpose of encrypting never was to guarantee secrecy forever anyway and quantum computing is still a ways off). If a government agency decides that it's likely they have an interest in knowing what you've written in that e-mail (which they had to have done by virtue of who it was to or other outside information), they must _contact you_ and _ask_ you (or the other party) to reveal the communications. This is either done with a search warrant or with illegal coercion. If you had been discussing your various drug deals, then you're boned and you probably should be because they knew you were doing it without reading that e-mail and now they're just building a case. If it's just legitimate communications, you reveal the message and they learn a lesson (maybe) from the time and money they wasted. If it's so secret that prison is not as bad as the consequences of revealing the message, you go to prison, secure in the knowledge that the e-mail is safe for X years (X depending on key size and method, and whether party B cracks).
What's the difference? If the gov't really wants to know, and you don't want to go to jail, then they still end up knowing. But they had to _ask_ through _legitimate_ channels. The difference is in the power that you have over the secrecy of your data. In situation 1 you have no power whatsoever. In situation 2, you (and the other party) have absolute power, and can even go to jail to protect the secrecy of the data.
Unless you're talking to your tech-impaired grandmother, why would you not want control over the flow of your communications?
(An un-related side note: Is the slashdot captcha _always_ 'ferocity', or is that just my own personal word?)
I used to work at an H.H. Gregg (southeastern regional consumer electronics/appliances), and we put Best Buy and Circuit City to shame. Every single month, 15% of your net sales _had_ to be extended warranties (though we called them MSEs or some crap). If you didn't hit that goal, 1st month you get a warning. Second month, you get fired. No questions, it was made clear that they'd terminate the best salesman there if he didn't hit his numbers. Talk about pushing people to buy crap, the store honors and jokes always went to the guy who sold a $50 warranty on a $100 VCR...
True, but that assumes a great number of things about the integrity of the computer. In order to verify the download, the correct certificate authority keys must exist, and the computer must already have the correct microsoft keys. It would be much more technically feasible to have an attack vector that lacks the ability to run arbitrary code, but has access to modify non-executable memory, and thus can change the microsoft public key in memory to the microshaft public key immediately prior to issuing the update command. It's still not easy, but digital signatures are only as secure as the memory they're stored in.
First, see my response to the other guy's comment RE the post office analogy, and motivations for signing up for the army in general.
Second, don't be so hasty to throw out the idea that someone has to be stupid not to know what an army is used for. You don't.
I agree if you meant that the commander in cheif was/is/is still being stupid for mis-using our army, but the armed forces are not only there to 'fight wars'.
While I don't agree with the war at all, saying the fact that they signed up for a job that could possibly entail (to be fair, some troops in Iraq were troops before the war, and some troops in the armed forces are not in Iraq at the moment, both of which go to show that being in the military does not always entail killing) is grounds to say 'fuck em' is a bit harsh.
I will grant that _some_ people in the armed forces signed up to kill people. That's the case with any country's military. That will continue to be the case until that far off day arrives when we can live in a Kantian perpetually peaceful society, if that ever occurs.
However, some (much more than the former type, I'd wager) of the troops signed up for the armed forces out of a sense of duty to the country. Others are poorly educated and felt that the military was the only place they could go to get themselves into shape and make something out of themselves. Others have a long line of military fathers, and they felt a duty to both family and country.
My analogy to the postman was not intended to liken delivering packages to delivering bullets. I was merely trying to point out that one ought to keep a clear distinction between the general purpose, the orders and the person. The general purpose of our armed forces is to prevent other countries from interfering with the sovereignty of the United States. That is honorable, justified, and required. The orders are to invade Iraq and attempt to enforce our view of 'a proper government' upon them. That's dispicable, illogical, and seems more and more corrupt as time goes by. Fuck the war. The person, however, is a fellow citizen doing what the person feels is right and is owed to the country.
...and I have no problem saying that the people who signed up out of bloodlust are getting what they asked for. I know some people in the Army like that. (I'm not in the army, i knew them before they left.) But I also know some people who are genuinely good people that feel it's their civic duty.
Blaming a US soldier serving in Iraq for Iraq war would be like blaming a Mafia thug for helping enable the crimes of Mafia. US doesn't have conscription, but a voluntary for-pay army. If you choose to take money from it in order to help it in its activities, of your own free will and under no coercion, then of course you can be blamed for taking part in said activities. Why on Earth would US soldiers be exempt from being held accountable for their choices ?
Read what you said again. If one chooses to help the army of their country for pay as an act of free will, of course they should be held accountable for their actions. You say this in the context of blaming a US soldier for the Iraq war. The problem is that the US soldier chose to serve his country, NOT to attack Iraq. Had the US soldier signed up for the "let's invade Iraq on false pretenses" club, then yes, blame the soldier for doing so.
By your logic, lets also blame postal workers for delivering mail bombs and anthrax. If they signed up to deliver packages, of course they should be liable for the packages they deliver. Or perhaps we should look deeper and realize that they didn't sign up to deliver THAT package, they signed up to deliver packages.
This is a thread for anyone who might be interested in contributing to this project in any fashion. If we actually can put together a team of people willing to do this project for X dollars, finding people interested in this product shouldn't be terribly difficult.
Overall goal - Develop a system that can be deployed on as many existing POS machines (that are at least able to do general computations, i.e. not embedded POS only hardware) that uses a standard format for storing customer, transactional, etc, data. This would provide a strong foundation for sales-reporting, statistical, etc, use. A standard 'sales info' format would do a great deal of good when it comes to providing choices for POS solutions.
I'm a senior in computer science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I have also thought that the current crop of POS software is shabby at best. Most of the POS systems already run on general purpose computers, so it would be ideal if it was possible to have a lightweight system to use this hardware. A complete system would be a distribution capable of running at a number of levels. Here's my idea of what the levels and their goals could be. Every level would be configured to be able to interoperate with other POS machines (both those from within the project and from outside, facilitated by a published communications protocol)
Very low resource POS terminal - This would be the mode intended for an ancient machine that still is able to run linux. It would be a console (text only) interface with the goal of a no-frills functional (but still easier on the eyes and easier to use than first generation POS consoles) POS machine that could be stand alone or networked.
Mid level graphical - A lower resource version of the next level, with some eye candy and other intensive features removed. Would most likely be the most commonly used.
Full performance graphical - Runs a graphical interface that takes advantage of all available resources. The overwhelming majority of PCs could support this.
Server station - May also act as a POS station. Coordinates the activities of any number (scalable to redundant multiple stations if there's need) of POS stations, coordinates the storing of POS data into databases, enforcing policy for POS stations, etc. A central point of control for monitoring real-time activity, controlling stations, etc.
Dumb frontend - A station that does not need to be directly connected to any hardware, but rather uses server-supplied resources. I.E. a dumb touchscreen could be a frontend, while the credit card reader and reciept printer connected to it are actually connected to the server, though this is transparent to the user.
Communications between devices can be secured via public key protocols: a key stored on the harddrive, or a smartcard stored inserted in a reader, possibly with the reader housed inside the PC case for tamper resisitance. Employee permissions could be controlled in any manner that PC security is handled: smart card, password (not recommended), biometric, etc.
Can you imagine the budget we'll get when we lock up this discovery so that no one else can cure diabetes but us?
There, fixed that for ya.
What you said -
Fact - The Military Commisions Act of 2006 was passed by a Republican Congress. Even if they got kicked out shortly afterwards, it's still relevant to consider the group of trai^h^h^h^h congressmen that passed it. Next.
Fact - Whether or not the law sets guidelines that apply to US Citizens (the point which you are presumably mistakenly trying to argue), it is US LAW and does in fact apply to US CITIZENS. Arguably, that is the _only_ group of people it applies to, as it is rediculous to imagine a US Citizen bound by Canadian law and so forth. US Code = Law for US Citizens.
Where to begin... 1. Habeas Corpus was first referenced in writing in 1305 by King Edward I. It was first passed into law by an act of English parliment in 1679. As such, it's been around a hell of a lot longer than many of the 'fundamental rights' that you commonly acknowledge (assuming you do in fact acknowledge the existance of a 'fundamental' right). 2. Gonzales was not making some off-handed personal remark on the issue. He was speaking in his capacity of the lawyer for the United States. His words were the expression of the will of the United States executive branch.
I hate to be the one to mention Jose Padilla, but he was a case of a US citizen on US soil that was apprehended and treated as an 'enemy combatant'. The problem is not that this will magically cause the US gov't to now do this. As historical facts have shown, the US _will_ do this in at least a certain subset of cases. The problem is that this gives the US gov't resource to do this AND to not have public review of the facts. Certainly, the US Gov't would not break into a television station and apprehend someone who is currently displaying their US passport on national television. That's not the gov't abuse _I'm_ worried about. The problem is when a person in the government, likely without the explicit permission or knowledge of their superiors, issues an order to "apprehend the alien who is currently located at 124 Pine St. What? No, this isn't a US Citizen, it's an illegal alien with forged paperwork. I've done the research, your job is not to look up citizen records, that's my job. Go apprehend the terrorist!" Before, the idea was that in this case the prisoner could request a writ be heard, and the fact that we grant writs of habeas corpus would be all the evidence needed for an observer to recognize that, if this person's writ isn't being considered at all, there may be a problem here. Right, it's _not_ perfect. It _is_ abusable. However, this new anti-terrorist (tm) legislation means that in the above situation it would be completely accepta
Careful with those absolutes. At a base level, the baby is forming a neural pattern that identifies to the physical ball, yes, but what are those formed _from_? The patterns are formed from the physical sensory input and the emotional visceral input. We have a fairly good idea what the baby is seeing (or from the perspective of reading the adult's mind, what the adult saw as a baby) when he looks at the ball. We have a potentially huge database of information as to what other individuals comprehended the ball as, and if it's a big issue we can observe a baby in controlled conditions looking at a ball for the first time.
... Our work with mice also yielded a way for us to compare patterns from one brain to another--and even to pass information from a brain to a computer. Using a mathematical treatment called matrix inversion, we were able to translate the activities of neural clique assemblies into a string of binary code, where 1 represents an active state and 0 represents an inactive state for each coding unit within a given assembly we examined. For example, the memory of an earthquake might be recorded as "11001," where the first 1 represents activation of the general startle clique, the second 1 represents activation of the clique that responds to a motion disturbance, the first 0 indicates lack of activity in the air-puff clique, the second 0 indicates lack of activity in the elevator-drop clique and the final 1 shows activation of the earthquake clique. We have applied a similar binary code to the neural ensemble activity from four different mice and were able to predict, with up to 99 percent accuracy, which event they had experienced and where it had happened. In other words, by scanning the binary code we could read and compare the animals' minds mathematically.
There was an interesting article in July in Scientific American. Researchers took mice and subjected them to startling events, and compared the patterns. They had very interesting results, I strongly recommend the article.
Although the idea that memories and perception might be represented by neural populations is not new, we think we have the first experimental data that reveal how such information is actually organized within the neural population. The brain relies on memory-coding cliques to record and extract different features of the same event, and it essentially arranges the information relating to a given event into a pyramid whose levels are arranged hierarchically, from the most general, abstract features to the most specific aspects.
Swarm of UAVs for surveillance of hostile (and friendly?) countries. UAVs work together to accomplish goals such as "make sure there is a flyover of areas X Y and Z every 10 minutes", "keep a unit no less than 5 minutes away from this location", "keep 20 units in the airspace, but make sure each unit charges to at least 40% at all times."
Right. The only way a state or other entity could possibly afford to take on a project as ambitious as 'watch everyone everywhere at all times' would be to find some way to get massive amounts of funding and support. It would also require a large amount of research into the fields of pattern recognition (neural nets for facial and behavioral recognition). You'd almost have to find a large amount of very wealthy people and convince them that it would be in their best interests to finance the project for you.
Thank god that China Security and Surveillance Technology and China Public Security Technology, two companies that have the goal of doing just that are now listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYTimes Linky). During the period from April 2006 to April 2007, $164.2 million dollars has been invested in the China Security and Surveillance Technology company by US investment groups.
From the article:
But hey, maybe, after they've done all the hard work of researching and field testing the equipment, us Westerners can buy a few of the systems off of them cheap. After technology like this has been developed and tested, what up-with-the-times state wouldn't want a few of these lying around for 'social stability.'
I, for one, welcome our new bought-and-paid-for overlords.
Here's my post. I encourage everyone to POST THEIR THOUGHTS TO THE FCC!!
/ upload_v2.hts?ws_mode=proc_name&proc_id=07-52
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/websql/prod/ecfs
If network neutrality is not upheld, this will have a disastrous effect
on the market for Internet services. Service companies that rely on
advertising or other revenue not directly taken from the consumer are
currently operating on the basis that they are paying for bandwidth they
use, therefore they pay in proportion to the amount of people that visit.
This has the effect of allowing very small services and companies on the internet, which will
effectively be barred from competing if ISPs are able to throttle
consumer's connection speeds and ability to connect to these
services on condition that the service provider itself pay. This
effectively raises the barrier to entry in the service providing market
to an arbitrarily high limit, one which is determined only by the market
practices of ISPs in every area the service provider wishes to serve.
This would, in effect, require every service provider to do extensive,
and expensive, research to determine which geographical market area
they wish to provide service to, which diminishes competition in the
service providing market by limiting any given service provider to operate
only in the areas that the service provider can afford or otherwise provide
for agreements with ISPs.
Some will say that no network neutrality will spur the ISP market by
causing new demands for ISPs that do not throttle connection speeds,
however this is dependent on the public knowledge of exactly what is
going on behind the scenes. This has the effect of raising the
barrier to entry of the ISP business, as any new business that seeks
to benefit by offering un-throttled connections would first have to
either take on the expense of educating the market that they wish
to serve or to only serve a market which is already aware of the
difference.
As both of these effects raise the barrier to entry of Internet related
markets, and serve to benefit large established companies at the expense
of smaller ones, it is not in the public interest to allow ISPs to
classify traffic based on arbitrary conditions such as those that
would be dependent on which service provider a consumer is communicating with.