This is a litigation timebomb that is going to loudly and messily explode in the near future.
If technological progress has taught us one thing, it is that industries with a vested interests against this progress have caused huge problems in the uptake and development of those technologies. Witness the lack of standards for both web audio and video despite 20+ years of research and development. Witness the paltry excuse for digital media distribution in the music and movie industries(though things are slowly improving). Witness the insulting excuses for digital distribution from the book publishing industry.
In the case of all these industries, copyright industries, we have seen time and again an open hostility towards new technological innovations which challenge the status quo. Hostility which breaks out in the form of legal action, and overally battery of the fledgling new industries which are emerging. Effectively, new technologies and industries are crippled, hindered and even driven underground for decades(Do we even have a real digital music industry today?).
This is all going to happen again with 3D printing.
The first industry that is going to fire the fire legal shots in the coming war will be the wargaming and hobbist modelling industry. Companies like Games Workshop and model aircraft makers are going to throw indignant holy fits when people start making, distributing and and printing off Ork warrior and Spitfire models.
Expect companies like MakerBot to be promptly sued within the next two to five years and service like Thingiverse to be taken down with DMCA notices left and right. Companies that sell model 747 aircraft at +$100 a piece will choose to litigate rather than see their handsome margins evaportate as people being downloading and printing entirely user created models of such 40+ year old aircraft.
After this, toy companies like Mattel, Bandai, and the Lego group will join the legal parades, stomping 3D printing into the gutter along with file-sharing service. Craftwork, construction supplier, and possibly major retailers will also get in on the game if they feel their margins are threatened. In the end, 3D printing will remain legal, but so smeared and risky that no true industry will be built on it for a decade or three--or four.
And if you think that will be bad, just wait until the food and drinks industry gets wind of the 3D food printers! The first website to release downloadable blueprints for a chocolate bar or a recipe for pseudo-coca-cola, and the Rep-Rap will be declared as a weapon of mass destruction!
While something as ordinary as being on AIM might at first appear trivial(and indeed might well be), things like this can have subtle but profound effects on society at large.
The best examples of this come from around the turn of the last century. Various mechanical and electrical devices changed people's lives in small but significant ways, for example, the lightbulb(or gas lamp), and the sewing machine.
In the last ten years, the mass uptake of the Internet is certainly a socially and culturally significant invention; and--shallow as they are--services like AIM played a part in familiarising people with, and forming their expectations of, this new medium.
Personally, I think contrasting AIM and Facebook is important as AIM was a more straightforward, simple application. Its simplicity allowed it to be widely used, but also encouraged people to explore other parts of the web as it matured. Facebook by contrast is an all singing, all dancing Walled Garden, whose stated objective is to keep people on its site, and its site alone, for as long as possible.
Thus, the experiences of new internet users now are profoundly different to those of new users even 10 years ago. Todays internet is less like a multi-way chatroom where you choose the topic of the conversation, and more like a one way television channel, where you can happen to post the odd message in your own little sandboxed corner.
There is a deeper shift going on in the web, and while they may not seem useful to engineering mind, only "intellectuals" of the philosophical and sociological variety are equipped to understand, analyse and explain this shift and its implications. If there are any of course.
The whole point of a censors office is that no-one should know anything about what, why, or how the are censoring anything.
A good censors office is unelected, unaccountable, opaque, and their decisions must not be subject to appeal. A good censors office is the exact opposite of an open court, a short circuiting of the rule of law.
The British Judges issuing these "super-injuctions" have been out of control for some time.
Recently, they've begun issuing so called "hyper-injunctions, where not only are you not allowed to reveal details of the matter, and not only are you forbidden from revealing that you are forbidden from reveal details of a matter, you are further forbidden from talking to any journalist or even your own MP about the matter or the fact that you are unable to reveal details of a matter.
When one of these injunctions was revealed by an MP speaking in parliament, the judges attempted to prevent newspapers from publishing the proceeding of parliament. (Like the spineless curs they are, the British press immediately capitulated). The matter caused quite a todo, but instead of reforming the system, the judges invented hyper-injunctions instead.
Basically, the British judges are out of control. And the judges are the problem here. No sensible judge concerned with the dignity of his office would issue such a ridiculous gag order for twitter users. It's barely one step above ordering people to stop gossiping in pubs. Ordering around citizens from other countries is hardly a major move by comparision.
It would be interesting to figure out why the judges are behaving like this, particularly in England, where judges are renowned for issuing decisive judgements and setting common law precedent. While I know little about it, I'm going to pre-emptively blame whatever pro-business, anti-justice legal philosophy that has been promoted over the last 30 years in law schools, until I see evidence to the contrary.
Notice however that the original source stated that the pornography was found "inside the compound", and we already know there were younger couriers working within it, a courier whose job took him regularly alone to internet cafes with usb sticks in hand.
It's easy to jump to conclusions, but the fact is that it is more likely that any collection of pornography would be in the hands of the younger men in the compound(Bin Laden was in his 50s).
It's clear that chinese whispers are inflating this story as it goes along. The second link is a fairly transparent attempt by the submitter to conflate this alleged collection of Bin Laden's with child pornography. And while all this is possible, I see no evidence whatsoever that Bin Laden actually had any pornography collection at all.
The fact is that we have access to more information than any people in history, but if one is unable to think CRITICALLY about the data, it's almost worse than useless.
Having ACCESS to the data, and having the data itself in front of you are two completely different things. Do you think that I'm going to spend my day looking for hard facts about Google or any other company I don't really care about. I have things to do!!
This is all about the media industry and its _actual_ role as a hired out propaganda apparatus. Wealthy interests pay newspapers, radio and TV station to publish the stories those interests wish to see published. That's how the media operates and that's how it will _always_ operate.
All that claptrap about "the free press" and "guardians of democracy" is a pile of cow dung, as anyone who lived through the last 10 years can easily tell. Read your history books and you will see that it has always been thus. The media consists almost entirely of hired shills, whose job it is to influence your opinion in exchange for money. This story is simply and admission by one of their clients.
Todays Fun Fact: Most PR employees are in fact former journalists(or journalism majors).
This is the problem with privatisation. If you give something over to a private interests to manage, they will relentlessly manage and re-manage the company in an effort to extract as much remuneration in bonuses,etc for themselves as they possibly can. Instead of simply following their brief and running the quiet, efficient operation they promised you, a private company will cut corners, invent new side businesses, change their brief, and eventually derail the organisation from its original purpose. They will then expect you to bail out the smoking wreck of a functioning institution which you used to own.
The entire operation that is now ICANN, all its basic briefs and functions, was once run by one man, Jon Postel. Now you can spin it any way you want, but even with the growth of the network since 1994, ICANN should consist of an office with perhaps 20-30 people to perform the same task today. That would be an efficient operation.
Instead ICANN has almost 200 employees, with the organisation being overload with dozens of vice presidents, boardmembers, and other useless executives who are paid over $200,000 a piece, probably for having absolutely no computer science or networking knowledge whatsoever. And of course these wasters are going to come up with new bullshit revenue services, regardless of the resulting damage. Gotta pay for that third mansion somehow!
My understanding is that Postel performed his functions in his spare time.
Remember that scene in Wall Street, when Gordon Gecko gives that speech in front of the paper company's 33 deadweight, overcompensated vice-presidents. Guess what; Telstar paper is real, real and profligate in the modern era. We are all surrounded by Telstar papers and their creaking boards of well paid wasters. And Gecko? Apparently he went into finance in London. God help us all.
You can kill anonymous. It takes effort and a longstanding commitment, and the most effective longterm methodology is to neutralize what motivates its organic membership.
Having people who host sites like encyclopedia dramatica and 4chan to switch their efforts to "Safe for Work" sites instead is probably the best way to go about this.
As I see it, the entire internet is collectively self organising itself into cable TV.
Coal plants don't render 1200 square kilometers of (sub)urban land uninhabitable for 50+ years when they go belly up.
The tsunami has turned large areas of Japan's eastern seaboard into a wasteland of debris, detritus and dead bodies. But the waters receded; people can rebuild.
Fukushima Daiishi has render the area around it uninhabitable for far, far longer. People cannot rebuild, even if they want to. Plant workers are going to start dropping like flies from chronic radiation poisoning, if they're not doing so already. Radiation is leaking into the surrounding waters, in a country with a large diet of fish and important local fishing industry. The country is now facing rolling blackouts for several years due to its reliance on a plant that cannot be replaced or repaired in good time when things go wrong.
Against this, coal plants do --what exactly? Pollute? Cause respiratory problems? Cost a lot in fuel? Hell, given that choice, I say fire up those old smokers!! It beats the alternative--and I'm an environmentalist.
living in a private luxury compound (right outside the main military Academy on the outskirts of Pakistan's capital) which was at least eight times larger then anything nearby.
Well, to be fair, I don't think most people would ever have suspected that was where he was. I mean, that's some _legendary_ hiding in plain sight, reverse psychology concealment right there. To get more audacious, he'd have to holed up in like, Washington D.C., or New York or something.
That won't get rid of Party Whips though. I'm from Ireland, and though the country has PR voting, it also has one of the most iron fisted whips systems in the world (The whip system was actually invented in Ireland).
Slashdot Mirror
Then, I finally buy a Wii.
This is a litigation timebomb that is going to loudly and messily explode in the near future.
If technological progress has taught us one thing, it is that industries with a vested interests against this progress have caused huge problems in the uptake and development of those technologies. Witness the lack of standards for both web audio and video despite 20+ years of research and development. Witness the paltry excuse for digital media distribution in the music and movie industries(though things are slowly improving). Witness the insulting excuses for digital distribution from the book publishing industry.
In the case of all these industries, copyright industries, we have seen time and again an open hostility towards new technological innovations which challenge the status quo. Hostility which breaks out in the form of legal action, and overally battery of the fledgling new industries which are emerging. Effectively, new technologies and industries are crippled, hindered and even driven underground for decades(Do we even have a real digital music industry today?).
This is all going to happen again with 3D printing.
The first industry that is going to fire the fire legal shots in the coming war will be the wargaming and hobbist modelling industry. Companies like Games Workshop and model aircraft makers are going to throw indignant holy fits when people start making, distributing and and printing off Ork warrior and Spitfire models.
Expect companies like MakerBot to be promptly sued within the next two to five years and service like Thingiverse to be taken down with DMCA notices left and right. Companies that sell model 747 aircraft at +$100 a piece will choose to litigate rather than see their handsome margins evaportate as people being downloading and printing entirely user created models of such 40+ year old aircraft.
After this, toy companies like Mattel, Bandai, and the Lego group will join the legal parades, stomping 3D printing into the gutter along with file-sharing service. Craftwork, construction supplier, and possibly major retailers will also get in on the game if they feel their margins are threatened. In the end, 3D printing will remain legal, but so smeared and risky that no true industry will be built on it for a decade or three--or four.
And if you think that will be bad, just wait until the food and drinks industry gets wind of the 3D food printers! The first website to release downloadable blueprints for a chocolate bar or a recipe for pseudo-coca-cola, and the Rep-Rap will be declared as a weapon of mass destruction!
While something as ordinary as being on AIM might at first appear trivial(and indeed might well be), things like this can have subtle but profound effects on society at large.
The best examples of this come from around the turn of the last century. Various mechanical and electrical devices changed people's lives in small but significant ways, for example, the lightbulb(or gas lamp), and the sewing machine.
In the last ten years, the mass uptake of the Internet is certainly a socially and culturally significant invention; and--shallow as they are--services like AIM played a part in familiarising people with, and forming their expectations of, this new medium.
Personally, I think contrasting AIM and Facebook is important as AIM was a more straightforward, simple application. Its simplicity allowed it to be widely used, but also encouraged people to explore other parts of the web as it matured. Facebook by contrast is an all singing, all dancing Walled Garden, whose stated objective is to keep people on its site, and its site alone, for as long as possible.
Thus, the experiences of new internet users now are profoundly different to those of new users even 10 years ago. Todays internet is less like a multi-way chatroom where you choose the topic of the conversation, and more like a one way television channel, where you can happen to post the odd message in your own little sandboxed corner.
There is a deeper shift going on in the web, and while they may not seem useful to engineering mind, only "intellectuals" of the philosophical and sociological variety are equipped to understand, analyse and explain this shift and its implications. If there are any of course.
The whole point of a censors office is that no-one should know anything about what, why, or how the are censoring anything.
A good censors office is unelected, unaccountable, opaque, and their decisions must not be subject to appeal. A good censors office is the exact opposite of an open court, a short circuiting of the rule of law.
Another great application of economic theory to our social, political, and/or cultural problems.
Western society is toast.
The British Judges issuing these "super-injuctions" have been out of control for some time.
Recently, they've begun issuing so called "hyper-injunctions, where not only are you not allowed to reveal details of the matter, and not only are you forbidden from revealing that you are forbidden from reveal details of a matter, you are further forbidden from talking to any journalist or even your own MP about the matter or the fact that you are unable to reveal details of a matter.
When one of these injunctions was revealed by an MP speaking in parliament, the judges attempted to prevent newspapers from publishing the proceeding of parliament. (Like the spineless curs they are, the British press immediately capitulated). The matter caused quite a todo, but instead of reforming the system, the judges invented hyper-injunctions instead.
Basically, the British judges are out of control. And the judges are the problem here. No sensible judge concerned with the dignity of his office would issue such a ridiculous gag order for twitter users. It's barely one step above ordering people to stop gossiping in pubs. Ordering around citizens from other countries is hardly a major move by comparision.
It would be interesting to figure out why the judges are behaving like this, particularly in England, where judges are renowned for issuing decisive judgements and setting common law precedent. While I know little about it, I'm going to pre-emptively blame whatever pro-business, anti-justice legal philosophy that has been promoted over the last 30 years in law schools, until I see evidence to the contrary.
Notice however that the original source stated that the pornography was found "inside the compound", and we already know there were younger couriers working within it, a courier whose job took him regularly alone to internet cafes with usb sticks in hand.
It's easy to jump to conclusions, but the fact is that it is more likely that any collection of pornography would be in the hands of the younger men in the compound(Bin Laden was in his 50s).
It's clear that chinese whispers are inflating this story as it goes along. The second link is a fairly transparent attempt by the submitter to conflate this alleged collection of Bin Laden's with child pornography. And while all this is possible, I see no evidence whatsoever that Bin Laden actually had any pornography collection at all.
And being a bitter, begrudging old curmudgeon makes nothing funny at all!
Well, you could all have done with a few more hours in the gym, it's true....
Because a Tor user would have been a lot easier to track down.
Having ACCESS to the data, and having the data itself in front of you are two completely different things. Do you think that I'm going to spend my day looking for hard facts about Google or any other company I don't really care about. I have things to do!!
This is all about the media industry and its _actual_ role as a hired out propaganda apparatus. Wealthy interests pay newspapers, radio and TV station to publish the stories those interests wish to see published. That's how the media operates and that's how it will _always_ operate.
All that claptrap about "the free press" and "guardians of democracy" is a pile of cow dung, as anyone who lived through the last 10 years can easily tell. Read your history books and you will see that it has always been thus. The media consists almost entirely of hired shills, whose job it is to influence your opinion in exchange for money. This story is simply and admission by one of their clients.
Todays Fun Fact: Most PR employees are in fact former journalists(or journalism majors).
This is the problem with privatisation. If you give something over to a private interests to manage, they will relentlessly manage and re-manage the company in an effort to extract as much remuneration in bonuses,etc for themselves as they possibly can. Instead of simply following their brief and running the quiet, efficient operation they promised you, a private company will cut corners, invent new side businesses, change their brief, and eventually derail the organisation from its original purpose. They will then expect you to bail out the smoking wreck of a functioning institution which you used to own.
The entire operation that is now ICANN, all its basic briefs and functions, was once run by one man, Jon Postel. Now you can spin it any way you want, but even with the growth of the network since 1994, ICANN should consist of an office with perhaps 20-30 people to perform the same task today. That would be an efficient operation.
Instead ICANN has almost 200 employees, with the organisation being overload with dozens of vice presidents, boardmembers, and other useless executives who are paid over $200,000 a piece, probably for having absolutely no computer science or networking knowledge whatsoever. And of course these wasters are going to come up with new bullshit revenue services, regardless of the resulting damage. Gotta pay for that third mansion somehow!
My understanding is that Postel performed his functions in his spare time.
Remember that scene in Wall Street, when Gordon Gecko gives that speech in front of the paper company's 33 deadweight, overcompensated vice-presidents. Guess what; Telstar paper is real, real and profligate in the modern era. We are all surrounded by Telstar papers and their creaking boards of well paid wasters. And Gecko? Apparently he went into finance in London. God help us all.
I would be more inclined to call it the efficient dismantling of the free web.
Well, I've got over 10GB of music and I've never used the service or anything like it.
Having people who host sites like encyclopedia dramatica and 4chan to switch their efforts to "Safe for Work" sites instead is probably the best way to go about this.
As I see it, the entire internet is collectively self organising itself into cable TV.
Coal plants don't render 1200 square kilometers of (sub)urban land uninhabitable for 50+ years when they go belly up.
The tsunami has turned large areas of Japan's eastern seaboard into a wasteland of debris, detritus and dead bodies. But the waters receded; people can rebuild.
Fukushima Daiishi has render the area around it uninhabitable for far, far longer. People cannot rebuild, even if they want to. Plant workers are going to start dropping like flies from chronic radiation poisoning, if they're not doing so already. Radiation is leaking into the surrounding waters, in a country with a large diet of fish and important local fishing industry. The country is now facing rolling blackouts for several years due to its reliance on a plant that cannot be replaced or repaired in good time when things go wrong.
Against this, coal plants do --what exactly? Pollute? Cause respiratory problems? Cost a lot in fuel? Hell, given that choice, I say fire up those old smokers!! It beats the alternative--and I'm an environmentalist.
Soooo.... you post on 4chan.
Clearly, someone's never worked on a Visual Basic project.
On the presumption that the GP is posting from an iDink gadget of some kind, this thread is actually still on-topic.
At least they'll have tried, instead of shooting down the in a board meeting because it won't generate enough immediate profit.
Or alternatively, proving that there exists a single NP hard problem for which no such algorithm exists. At least, if I read your post right.
And why the soldier who keeps his mouth shut at all times is a True Patriot(TM).
Calvin, is that you?
Well, to be fair, I don't think most people would ever have suspected that was where he was. I mean, that's some _legendary_ hiding in plain sight, reverse psychology concealment right there. To get more audacious, he'd have to holed up in like, Washington D.C., or New York or something.
This tops Radovan Karadzic's disguise by a long shot.
That won't get rid of Party Whips though. I'm from Ireland, and though the country has PR voting, it also has one of the most iron fisted whips systems in the world (The whip system was actually invented in Ireland).