This might need a small clarification for US readers. It goes something like this:
Norwegian left Norwegian right Democrats Republicans
Not communist left in that you got democracy, freedom of speech, pro-choice, gay marriage etc. but economically it's very different than the US.
There are multiple ways I could interpret that, and I hope I interpreted it correctly. It sounds like your country is free of the abomination that exists in the USA since around the 1930s, which is the partitioning (and thus, dilution) of freedom into artificial concepts of "economic freedom" and "personal freedom". There is no major party in the USA that supports both, so no matter who wins our elections, the question is not "will the power and size of government and thus its involvement in daily life be expanded?" but rather, there is only the question of "for what stated purpose will the power and size of government be expanded?" which of course is unsustainable long-term.
Likewise, our money system is fatally flawed because it is designed in such a way that there is always more debt than there is money in circulation and therefore, it too is unsustainable long-term. I will just make one mild comment: after a while, a reasonable person starts to believe that these things are not accidents.
Do unordered lists like that look odd to anyone else? This only happens to me on Slashdot, but whenever anyone uses the UL and LI tags here, it ends up putting annoying greyish bars smack in the middle of the list. It's happened to me when I was the one authoring the post and constructing the list, so I know it's not because of extraneous HTML tags or anything like that. If it happened on any other site I ever visit I'd suspect a rendering problem with Firefox. Now I don't mean this in a bad way, but just realistically, considering all the oddities I see on Slashdot (like the way comment count occasionally disappears and reappears on the main page without explanation) I don't think this is because of Firefox.
In addition the employer has to pay a tax of 14.1 % of the employee's income that the employee never sees.
I will add just one thing to that: businesses don't actually pay taxes. Sure, they are charged taxes and they transfer money to the government, but when they do so they act as collection agents for the government. The difference between exclusive sales taxes and inclusive income taxes is that for the sales tax, the receipt given to the customer itemizes exactly how much of the total sum was spent on the tax. The meaningful difference ends there. The reason is because to a business, taxation is just another expense and is factored into their ideas of how much they need to charge for their goods and services in order to make the desired/attainable profit. If you raise the tax rate for businesses they will respond by raising the prices they charge by a proportionate amount, just as they would raise their prices if the cost of raw materials for their products went up. Thus, businesses do not pay taxes; they pass them on to their customers.
Maybe its not that they care so much about privacy that they don't care so much about piracy.
The reason the US gets so butt-hurt about piracy is because hollywood dominates the entertainment business worldwide - there are only a handful of countries were domestic movies regularly outsell hollywood productions at the box office (mostly S Korea, France, India and mainland China and some of that is helped by quota restrictions on foreign productions), and my guess is that the number is even smaller when it comes to DVDs.
Now I'm going to make a wild-ass guess that a lot of the locally produced works in Norway receive significant public funding. If true, that's also an incentive to ignore piracy because if tax dollars are paying for the creation then it isn't a big leap of logic to expect that the results are "owned" by the public too.
So, from that perspective, it seems reasonable that anti-piracy would be near the bottom of the list of government priorities in Norway (and many other countries for that matter).
I've always felt that when govenrments worry about things like piracy and drug usage, what they're really doing is sending the message "we have an overabundance of resources and personnel which is why we can afford to worry about these things -- please reduce our size and power immediately." The message is quite clear but there are a lot of people who have difficulty interpreting it.
You can't give speeding tickets if the freeway to too busy to speed... With enough officers that baby could pay it's self off in no time!
Amusing in a sardonic sort of way, when they build highways that look a lot like drag strips (wide, flat, straight, and with high visibility) and then pretend that there is a difference in safety between the 65 mph posted limit and 70 or 75 and they do this with no regard to whether there was even another car on the road. Nah, no revenue generation scheme there.
I wish I would be transferred to Alaska. The hunting and fishing is great. There is room to breath. A man can raise a family in a manner more suitable to the American ideal. The commutes cannot be any worse than the suburbs of any major US city.
Sign me up!
I hope you already have a family going then, because Alaska has a terribly unfavorable male-to-female ratio. Unfavorable if you're a man, that is. Otherwise I do agree with you.
You raise an excellent point, which only begs a very interesting question, what should we call it then? What's your idea?
Waiting for someone to come along and say "hah, you've got it all wrong, it's RAISING the question, not BEGGING the question!" If someone does, it would be more like a Slashdot meme.
In my way of looking at things, they met that definition the moment they bought laws. Lobbyists, advertising, and campaign contributions are all matters of spending money. If a company wants a law, and can arrange this by spending money on those things, it is quite accurate to say that they have bought a law.
Sometimes I think that one of the single biggest mistakes the USA has made was when corporations were given all of the legal rights that individuals enjoy. They should have full legal rights with one exception: they should be fully barred from any sort of participation, direct or indirect, in the political process. That right should be reserved for individuals.
If the DRM is so good that "the average person has no pragmatic or material objection to its restrictions" then objecting to it on "principle" alone becomes an exercise in, well, juvenile-wish-fulfillment. In fact, the "average" person has no problem with DRM schemes such as those that "lock" down DVDs or VHS (macrovision), nor those that iTunes had or most software has. I'm not saying that most DRM schemes are there yet, but if DRM is that unobtrusive, then I'd consider it an acceptable part of the real-world compromise necessary when dealing with the owners. I leave to each person to decide if that deal is Faustian or not.
My explanation of why I object on the basis of principle can be found in this post. Far from being juvenile, it's a recognition that there are timeless things in life which are and always have been far more important than immediate convenience and certainly more important than whether you can play your music. The juvenile approach is the one in which convenience is everything, where all concerns about whether something is wrong are put to rest by access to entertainment. Such an approach knows nothing of principle, or of the difference between what is legal and what is right and good.
What I'd fear more is the DRM schemes that are designed not to control but to outright discourage the use of digital media. Put on your tin-foil hat with me and ask for a second why content owners would allow online digital providers such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, MicroSoft, and Audible to run a service which can disable your ability to use a license not due to breach on your part but just because they don't want to maintain their servers anymore (and in some cases this has already happened, see Walmart). Any good contract between owner and provider would require that the customer be allowed continued use of the product as sold. Not having those provisions smacks of a scheme by the owners to be able to say "oh, your product doesn't work anymore, well, that's digital downloads for you. Aren't CDs so much nicer!"
No tinfoil hat is necessary for that. All you're doing there is making the observation that these companies are still living in the past, a past time when they had full control over distribution. It's a natural consequence they have no interest in correctly dealing with digital media, as you have pointed out. They have not decided that technological progress has created a different world with new possibilities, and that this means they should evaluate whether their business model is suited to this new world. Instead, they still want that old world where they have full control and they are willing to become adversaries to their own customers in order to preserve it. That is the actual problem. Rather than address this problem and become a joy to do business with, they want to apply a band-aid and this band-aid is called DRM. Other band-aids include wielding political clout to purchase laws that benefit their interests at the expense of others, and making monstrous "examples" by financially ruining the lives of people who have done very little harm to anyone. I cannot in any good conscience support this effort, nor any devices designed to promote it. It's not just that it isn't working, it's that it is wrong. No amount of convenience and no degree of music player reliability is going to change that.
I have no problem with DRM until it stops me from being able to use my media legally as I see fit. If a DRM scheme somehow prevented me from giving a file to my friends, but let me listen to the song on my ipod, Sansa, or Zune as I wished, that'd be perfectly okay. I don't mind buying products/services/licenses. The DRM that is demonized is the DRM that preemptively treats you like a criminal and unfairly restricts your usage of a PRODUCT THAT YOU PAID FOR THE USAGE OF.
Your post makes it sound like DRM is bad. BAD DRM is bad. Whether or not it can be effectively implemented is another issue; I know you couldn't magically detect the difference between a new media player and a friend's thumb drive.
All DRM is in fact bad because all DRM carries the assumption that you are incapable of doing the right thing and thus, must be actively prevented from doing the wrong thing. A DRM scheme that prevents you from giving a file to your friends is treating you like a criminal because the assumption behind it is that you WOULD give it to your friends -- they are so certain that you would do this, that they paid programmers to design a system to prevent it. To say that this restriction doesn't bother you because you wouldn't do that anyway misses the point. The point is that your morality means absolutely nothing if you have no ability to be immoral. To support any form of DRM is akin to saying that they are right to treat their customers in this adversarial, dehumanizing fashion.
DRM is power. It's power to control markets, to micromanage customers, to dictate obsolescence, and to hold content hostage. It's a power that comes with no concept of due process or innocent until proven guilty. It's a power that is "justified" by the fact that media companies have chosen not to create a business model suitable for the Information Age, which is no justification at all. It's a power that was not given to the companies willingly, but rather was one that they have taken for themselves. It was born not of overwhelming customer demand, but rather, a desire to control.
DRM is also a sad alternative to restoring the balance that once existed between the temporary monopoly granted by copyright and the benefit of society. Copyright was once only twelve years in duration, and this was when a mechanical printing press was the most technologically advanced method of distribution. We now have the ability to create and sell many more copies of a work in twelve years than we ever could have done before, yet copyright now has a ridiculous duration that has no concept of balance. It is plainly evident that you are dealing with people who are never going to be satisfied, for whom enough is never going to be enough.
The reason why so many no longer respect copyright is because it is no longer respectable. Those who choose to respect it anyway give it a benefit of doubt that the media companies are not willing to extend to their customers. Restoring the balance that once existed could create a world where people again respect copyright because they can see that it is reasonable and good. Such people would not want to infringe it, and thus, would need no restraints to prevent them from doing so. The fact that this simple, self-evident truth is so hard for so many to imagine is evidence enough that we have gone too far down this negative path that we are on. More DRM, no matter how benign, could only take us farther down that path.
If you gotta buy digital books or music, don't fall for any DRM scheme. Here's an example that even the biggest digital retailers can't get it right. I await a flawless DRM that will work on multiple pieces of hardware--hardware that I choose! I fear I will be waiting for quite some time...
Collectively, we generally don't appreciate and value what you describe there. The minority who does is probably small enough to be marginalized, though it does appear to be growing. That's the reason why (at least in the USA) it's so difficult to use any cellphone with any carrier's network, or why the most widely-used office software doesn't actively try to produce documents in a format that any other office software can use. There are many other examples.
And please, I'm sick of responses to my posts with some snide remark that you don't have DRM and yours is free with a link to the Pirate Bay. It's getting old. I want to support the content providers but I don't want to give up or inhibit my rights to access that content.
Just as you have your frustrations with that, the phenomenon itself is born of a frustration with the media companies and their refusal to work with us instead of against us. That refusal is why the very interoperability you describe is not the norm. I will neither defend nor condemn piracy, but I will say that it sums up to a "fuck them then" sort of reaction that, from the perspective of human nature, is rather understandable or at least predictable. The media companies seriously believe that they can view their customers as a resource that they may take for granted, like so much lumber or iron ore.
They believe they can do so with impunity, and if not for piracy, they would mostly be correct. Again I am not going to say whether it's right or wrong, only that the very companies which complain about piracy have done much to set the stage for it and to create the ill will that makes people feel justified when they infringe these copyrights. No one does anything unless they believe, verily or falsely, that it is the right thing to do, or at least that it is wrong but either justifiable or serves some kind of greater good. Those snide remarks you mention come from this sense of feeling justified, though of course there are better expressions of the same sentiment.
Honestly, if you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to buy a zune or kindle. Boycotts are the only way these companies are gonna learn that customers won't tolerate DRM.
The possibility that concerns me is the other way that companies could handle that realization. They could design a DRM system that is generous on all counts, such that the average person has no pragmatic or material objection to its restrictions. This would make its adoption by customers much more widespread and would present the very convincing illusion of nullifying the arguments against DRM. Certainly it would nullify the reasons against it which are not rooted in principle. Effectively, that would cause people to willingly cede control to those companies so long as those companies put a smiling face on this process that is convincing enough, and that's a shame. In this way does our addiction to convenience and our superficial appreciation of only the most immediate concerns render us weak and able to be manipulated by those who claim to serve their customers.
I hope the victory will be in the system no longer being able to pretend it is "for the people, by the people".
And then what? Just because people don't read/. doesn't mean they're stupid. They know what's going on as well as we do. Maybe they know it because their pension plans are gone or their kids are dead in a dummy war the US is fighting to keep the economy afloat. This broken system is the best we've got. No reform and no revolution could change that. What would you revolt into that would be incorruptible? People are incapable of governing themselves. Someday we'll design better people or machines who will be able to conquer and govern the rest of us effectively. Until then, just try to lay low.
I wouldn't try to make an incorruptible system. Until the general population becomes much more spiritual, understands why this has little or nothing to do with religion, truly loves their neighbors, and demands leaders of such attainments, you're never going to have that. Not while everything is one big business, nice and cold and impersonal and inhuman. I realize I am describing something that seems utterly impossible today, and many of you will prefer to find something wrong with it rather than dare to imagine it, just like I would have probably been laughed at had I talked to the ancient Romans about men flying in the skies and across oceans. If only our human aspirations were so high as our technical ones!
In the meantime, I would design a system that accounts for corruption. I'd probably start with the existing U.S. Constitution, only I'd add one amendment to it containing a mandatory procedure. Every 50 years, this would be the procedure:
All political parties on the federal level would be disbanded. All employees of said parties would be fired and barred, for life, from ever holding any such position again, enforcable by capital punishment, and they would receive generous pensions.
All politicians on the federal level, and their immediate family members, would be automatically fired and barred, for life, from ever holding any public office again, enforcable by capital punishment, and they would receive generous pensions.
All federal laws other than the Constitution would be completely wiped. This includes the federal tax code. This is consistent with the idea that citizens' experience with government should come almost entirely from the local and state levels. That's also why this would not be a descent into lawlessness.
All federal departments would be completely disbanded and all employees fired, with generous severence pay or pensions.
New federal elections will be held, with campaigns very generously funded entirely by public money and open to any citizen who seriously wants to run for office. Any other funding will be considered corruption and prosecuted as such (at all times, not just this "reset cycle").
I would add one other amendment to it. Under our current system, a person has to be convicted by a criminal law and in jeopardy of serving that sentence before they have a chance to challenge the constitutionality of that law. My amendment would state that if a politician votes for, sponsors, or otherwise officially supports a law in any way, and that law is later found to be unconstitutional and is overturned in court, that politician would automatically be required to serve whatever sentence the defendant was facing, be it a $100 fine or life in prison.
I'm sure there is room for improvement in my idea. The idea is that corruption has to establish itself and that establishment can be disrupted before it has much of a chance to take root. Every 50 years, you would have all of the benefits of the 1776 American Revolution except you would have them peacefully, legally, and without bloodshed. It would throw a "reset switch" on the federal level. I don't think this is necessary at the state level, because with those you can more ea
If accurate, that right there tells me that you were dealing with a passive person, a pushover or a lightweight or whatever you may call it. If he lacks his own understanding and his own perspective he's going to compete poorly against someone who has those things. That's one thing I very much like about argumentation: those who are not independent thinkers (the "sheeple" if you will) have a chance to discover why this is a significant disadvantage.
but that there were all these other things to consider that he should have said but that I had been steering the entire debate away from
In my previous post, I mentioned talk-show hosts in particular because they have complete control of the forum and can steer the conversation whether the caller is aware of it and wishes it or not. The scenario you mention was between peers, which again indicates that you were dealing with a passive individual who was willing to let you have more than your share of control. In fact, he may not have seen that as a choice. Unless you have good reasons for it, it's generally poor strategy to allow your opponent to lead you and guide your moves as though he had your best interests at heart, as though he were not strongly interested in your failure. It generally does not occur to reactive people that responding in a predictable fashion makes them the effect of someone else's cause, nor do they seem to appreciate the full implications of this. It sounds like you gave him a lesson. I'll just say that whether you derived more enjoyment from shooting a fish in a barrel or from providing a valuable lesson is not for me to speculate.
The situation with media campaigns is kind of like high school, except there's power, control and money involved.
Indeed. People like to believe that "the truth will win out", and it will, provided you love the truth more than you love to be entertained, more than you love showmanship, and more than you love to be told what you want to hear. There are a lot of people who would be quick to say that this describes them, mostly because it sounds good. It does not require great powers of observation to discern that unfortunately, only a minority of people truly understand this and really try to live like they understand it. Throwing money and power into the mix makes this much worse, not by changing the mechanics of the situation but by raising the stakes.
Some honest two-way dialog is what's needed, not preaching the old way.
I could be wrong but I think my first impression of the summary was somewhat like yours, though expressed differently. When I saw this part:
However, PR company for the industry Blue Rubicon attests that 'campaigns can change hearts and minds... If you do them right you can make a material impact on people's behaviour.
My first thought on reading that was "because a material impact is the only type they're capable of recognizing." I also have my doubts that their campaign is going to try to "change hearts and minds" with facts and reasoning. It's sort of like a debate which has an audience: if you're good, you can "win" a debate or an argument whether or not you are actually correct, particularly if your audience is naive, unfamiliar with argumentation and critical thinking, or has no independent understanding of the subject matter. Unfortunately, I think all three of those factors are working in favor of the *AAs. The Slashdot crowd is exceptional in many ways, but I would not expect the average person to be so familiar with these issues and many unrelated things remind me of the general public's lack of familiarity with argumentation and critical thinking.
Talk-show hosts do something similar all the time. They like to use the Socratic method not as a teaching tool, but to control the conversation by forcing the caller/guest into answering a series of simple questions that don't permit appreciation of differing viewpoints. Any attempts to suggest that the subject is more nuanced than this, that the questions don't cover the full scope of the issue, or that determing your conclusion prior to taking any other steps might be intellectually dishonest are dealt with. That's why the host's voice has a higher gain/volume than the caller's, why the host has a mute (or hold) button to instantly silence the caller, and is one (of several) reasons why calls are screened before being taken. Put those same hosts in a situation where they must interact as equals who cannot force the other person to submit to their control of the conversation and suddenly they'd have much greater difficulty seeming like they are always "right."
The situation with media campaigns is likewise asymmetric. The *AAs can easily afford to run these campaigns and get their side of the story into public view. Could you or I afford to produce and air our own commercials, on a national level, that argue against them and show any flaws in their reasoning? You mention two-way dialog. Imagine what it would do to all of PR and advertising if that were the norm.
The trick with mobile devices is that users want to run hundreds of thousands of untrusted programs from application markets. Native code leads to viruses, trojan horses, keyloggers and all kinds of nasty things. Users have to have a protection mechanism. Java with its multilayer security is perfect for mobile applications.
Most of these discussions/arguments about Java are strictly concerning performance, like whether or not Java is bloated and slow. Your post there is one of the first I've seen that neatly answers the question of "why Java?" If it is as you say, then that's a highly desirable feature. That's especially when you consider the volume of personal information that's usually contained on a mobile phone, which I'd imagine would make it an attractive target for malware.
If you are talking about servers, I have a newsflash for you. The majority of servers hardly use even 50% of their processing capacity on average. Java overhead at this stage of CPU development is negligible. Green movement will benefit more from saving the resources spent on development and maintenance of native code.
My understanding is that in most cases, a server is going to max out its disk I/O or its bandwidth before its CPU(s). That seems especially true to me for a Web server, since Javascript and other techniques delegate much of the processing to the clients.
I did have one question for you. In this post below, TheRaven64 stated:
The only way any program, irrespective of language, is able to influence any part of the system outside its own memory space is via system calls. You don't need to run your software in a VM to restrict the system calls it can access.
I don't know much about Java but this got me curious. What does Java offer here that would be difficult (or impractical/impossible) to achieve with using syscall restrictions and other devices to sandbox the apps? With virtual memory and appropriate syscall restrictions that sounds like it should work too, and would make it easier to run native code, yet I don't hear of devices that use such an approach. Is it that both methods are equally viable, only with Java someone has already created an implementation that is useful for mobile phones so why reinvent the wheel? Or is Java's approach inherently superior in some way?
"...If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a
myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their
tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by
the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure -- news which I seriously
think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy."
That is so true. Mere foreign news that, say, there's melamine in your food, or that a tsunami is on its way to your shores, should be ignored, nay, refused. Seen one tornado, seem 'em all, who gives a shit. (This is why philosophers have short lives and are ignored by the rest of humanity.)
And there's no need for more than one instance of any application, either. Thoreau lives!
I'm wondering if someone can so spectacularly fail to miss a point. If this is a troll, it's a pretty good one. What the hell, I'll bite...
Clearly, recognizing that the news is rooted in gossip and has much in common with it means that we must eschew all information from anyone, even when it's a warning of an impending event. That's because there is no such thing as balance; we must go from one polar extreme (of a voracious appetite for all news) to the other (ignoring all outside information no matter what). Sure. False dichotomies are great! Or...
When Paul Revere shouted "The British are coming!" that was a warning. When a major TV network says "$CELEBRITY is now undergoing her third divorce," that's news. Can we agree there is a difference between those two? Good. The latter case is what Thoreau was talking about, which is obvious, because assuming he's talking about anything else leads to the very objection you raised.
I don't understand why the author calls the foundational elements of game design atoms...
I mean.. logically, an atom in this context would imply the simplest, well-formed concepts of game design that cannot be broken down any further.
Concepts like "UI, inventory, power-ups, puzzles, conflicts" are generally abstract and can most certainly be broken down or interpreted differently. So, if the author needs a catchy buzzword label to define the content elements of his book... why choose a word that has scientific, logical and mathematical meaning? Meaning that conflicts with the intended meaning this label is supposed to define.
I think it's a requirement of buzzword-labels that they either make no sense or dilute the meaning of the original word, or both.
I don't believe it should take much to reach that point, either. To quote Henry David Thoreau (emphasis mine):
"And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house
burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of
grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a
myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their
tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by
the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure -- news which I seriously
think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy."
The meaning of "acquainted with the principle" is such a contrast to the methods of learning-by-rote so common in education today. As in, I believe the latter is doing it the hard way for the dubious "benefit" of avoiding abstract thought. Subjectively, I can see a link between that rote learning and the repetition behind this kind of hype saturation. It's how people have been conditioned to acquire information and it's how you transform a message into something everybody knows about. As a consequence, we don't have many proactive people who like to discover things on their own; we have passive people who wait to be told what the next big thing is. Of course, that's synonymous with the next popular thing. So, I think backlashes against this kind of hype are overdue but it helps if they comet with an understanding of why companies use these methods and why they make money when they do.
Now, #2 MIGHT still happen, and its what those in the Infectious Disease community are afraid of, but you're right, the current version of H1N1 is relatively benign and overhyped by the media... so far.
Before this there was SARS, hoof-and-mouth, mad cow, West Nile virus, and probably others I am forgetting that were supposed to be huge deadly threats. The problem is that after those, that community or at least what the media makes of them starts to look like the boy who cried "wolf" too many times. If the next one really is the deadly pandemic threat, I wouldn't be surprised if the general public's attitude is "yeah, we've heard THAT before." Either this is institutionalized stupidity, deliberate in nature, or they have thought of this and believe that their status as experts and authorities somehow exempts them from the effects of basic human nature.
Kind of a stretch to call Ho Chi Minh City "our culture" when you're talking about the USA, no?
I didn't do a very good job of explaining how the silliness and security theater that is mostly being pioneered in the USA is now spreading even to distant nations with rather different beliefs such as Vietnam. As I did a poor job of that, I am glad you called me on it. I see all of that as a general process of decline that has no borders, though there are reasons why it happens in some places first and takes time to spread to others. To put that another way, while I can't prove it, I strongly suspect that, had the USA reacted in a completely rational, "real security and not security theater" sort of way to 9/11, others would have followed suit. Instead, we acquired a national willingness to let irrational fear rule the day and some years later we see these folks in Vietnam following our example instead of providing a counter-example. That's a shame because counter-examples that might put the lie to this hysteria are rather badly needed.
That culture I referred to was not specific to any one country (that'd be an improvement). I referred to Western culture in general. The only part I meant to be specific to the USA is that we in particular used to stand for something better than this. In a way, this is a commentary on how many traditionally non-Western nations are undergoing a process which could be called "Westernization", similar to what Japan and China have dealt with and continue to deal with. I don't consider Vietnam to be the world's only isolated island that is completely unaffected and uninfluenced by the cultures with which it interacts, in other words. The article/summary specifically mentioned travelers who had been to the US and Australia, so we are talking about people who are at least familiar with Western culture. And make no mistake; fascism is also without borders, or would like to be. Those who want it to happen to the USA would really love to see that spread throughout the world. That's just as emperors and dictators throughout history have dreamed of ruling the world, and several of them did rule the (known) world.
When did I cede control over my body to the government?
Why, at least since the War on (some) Drugs. You don't own your body if the government can tell you what you may or may not put into it. Likewise, you don't own your consciousness if the government can tell you that there are authorized and unauthorized ways of altering it. In both cases, you are more like a tenant of your body and of your mind, not an owner. That's one of the major reasons why you don't use manipulative social engineering to solve perceived problems, because it sets some very nasty precedents like this. Precedents which later generations, having few or no counter-examples, grow up to believe are normal and acceptable.
If the War on Drugs actually did anything to reduce the street availability of the substances it seeks to control (do the research; it hasn't), I might feel differently about it, though I doubt it because my opposition to it is rooted in principle. As it has failed to achieve its primary stated goals, I consider it completely without merit and its ill side-effects to be unjustifiable. Anyway, to answer your question, yes we have ceded control over our bodies to the government and we did it a long time ago. We traded it for a little safety that hasn't kept us any safer but has guaranteed a steady flow of money to various criminal organizations by means of the black market. Like anyone else who trades what is priceless for something that has a price, we got screwed. Not only is some buyer's remorse in order, it's long overdue.
Why was the possibility of people taking OTC fever reducers not taken into account when designing this retarded ass H1N1 "detection" system
Because in our culture, your security is something that is done to you, not something in which you are actively involved. Being actively involved in your own interests would be a microcosm of self-determination, self-government, personal responsibility, and individualism. You know, those things that this country used to be all about. There is currently something of a war against those things right now, and I believe it's because they are perceived as obstacles by those who would like to see fascism in the USA. To be correctly appreciated, this must be seen not as isolated issues, but in terms of a few basic principles that determine many aspects of life.
To put that another way, you know what would really stop terrorists from hijacking an airplane? Hundreds of well-armed passengers. And no, a bullet hole will not decompress an aircraft.
Fever can be caused by lots of things. H1N1 isn't the only possible fever-inducing pathogen, and you can even have fever without having an infection. Preventing people with fever from travelling seems kind of an overkill.
What you said and the mentality that would refer to this as "cheating" rather than "we need to implement a better way to screen for this, preferably one that fully informs the airline passengers of our intentions" reminded me of a joke. TSA = Thugs Standing Around.
Slashdot Mirror
There are multiple ways I could interpret that, and I hope I interpreted it correctly. It sounds like your country is free of the abomination that exists in the USA since around the 1930s, which is the partitioning (and thus, dilution) of freedom into artificial concepts of "economic freedom" and "personal freedom". There is no major party in the USA that supports both, so no matter who wins our elections, the question is not "will the power and size of government and thus its involvement in daily life be expanded?" but rather, there is only the question of "for what stated purpose will the power and size of government be expanded?" which of course is unsustainable long-term.
Likewise, our money system is fatally flawed because it is designed in such a way that there is always more debt than there is money in circulation and therefore, it too is unsustainable long-term. I will just make one mild comment: after a while, a reasonable person starts to believe that these things are not accidents.
Do unordered lists like that look odd to anyone else? This only happens to me on Slashdot, but whenever anyone uses the UL and LI tags here, it ends up putting annoying greyish bars smack in the middle of the list. It's happened to me when I was the one authoring the post and constructing the list, so I know it's not because of extraneous HTML tags or anything like that. If it happened on any other site I ever visit I'd suspect a rendering problem with Firefox. Now I don't mean this in a bad way, but just realistically, considering all the oddities I see on Slashdot (like the way comment count occasionally disappears and reappears on the main page without explanation) I don't think this is because of Firefox.
I will add just one thing to that: businesses don't actually pay taxes. Sure, they are charged taxes and they transfer money to the government, but when they do so they act as collection agents for the government. The difference between exclusive sales taxes and inclusive income taxes is that for the sales tax, the receipt given to the customer itemizes exactly how much of the total sum was spent on the tax. The meaningful difference ends there. The reason is because to a business, taxation is just another expense and is factored into their ideas of how much they need to charge for their goods and services in order to make the desired/attainable profit. If you raise the tax rate for businesses they will respond by raising the prices they charge by a proportionate amount, just as they would raise their prices if the cost of raw materials for their products went up. Thus, businesses do not pay taxes; they pass them on to their customers.
Maybe its not that they care so much about privacy that they don't care so much about piracy.
The reason the US gets so butt-hurt about piracy is because hollywood dominates the entertainment business worldwide - there are only a handful of countries were domestic movies regularly outsell hollywood productions at the box office (mostly S Korea, France, India and mainland China and some of that is helped by quota restrictions on foreign productions), and my guess is that the number is even smaller when it comes to DVDs.
Now I'm going to make a wild-ass guess that a lot of the locally produced works in Norway receive significant public funding. If true, that's also an incentive to ignore piracy because if tax dollars are paying for the creation then it isn't a big leap of logic to expect that the results are "owned" by the public too.
So, from that perspective, it seems reasonable that anti-piracy would be near the bottom of the list of government priorities in Norway (and many other countries for that matter).
I've always felt that when govenrments worry about things like piracy and drug usage, what they're really doing is sending the message "we have an overabundance of resources and personnel which is why we can afford to worry about these things -- please reduce our size and power immediately." The message is quite clear but there are a lot of people who have difficulty interpreting it.
You can't give speeding tickets if the freeway to too busy to speed... With enough officers that baby could pay it's self off in no time!
Amusing in a sardonic sort of way, when they build highways that look a lot like drag strips (wide, flat, straight, and with high visibility) and then pretend that there is a difference in safety between the 65 mph posted limit and 70 or 75 and they do this with no regard to whether there was even another car on the road. Nah, no revenue generation scheme there.
I wish I would be transferred to Alaska. The hunting and fishing is great. There is room to breath. A man can raise a family in a manner more suitable to the American ideal. The commutes cannot be any worse than the suburbs of any major US city. Sign me up!
I hope you already have a family going then, because Alaska has a terribly unfavorable male-to-female ratio. Unfavorable if you're a man, that is. Otherwise I do agree with you.
Waiting for someone to come along and say "hah, you've got it all wrong, it's RAISING the question, not BEGGING the question!" If someone does, it would be more like a Slashdot meme.
In my way of looking at things, they met that definition the moment they bought laws. Lobbyists, advertising, and campaign contributions are all matters of spending money. If a company wants a law, and can arrange this by spending money on those things, it is quite accurate to say that they have bought a law.
Sometimes I think that one of the single biggest mistakes the USA has made was when corporations were given all of the legal rights that individuals enjoy. They should have full legal rights with one exception: they should be fully barred from any sort of participation, direct or indirect, in the political process. That right should be reserved for individuals.
My explanation of why I object on the basis of principle can be found in this post. Far from being juvenile, it's a recognition that there are timeless things in life which are and always have been far more important than immediate convenience and certainly more important than whether you can play your music. The juvenile approach is the one in which convenience is everything, where all concerns about whether something is wrong are put to rest by access to entertainment. Such an approach knows nothing of principle, or of the difference between what is legal and what is right and good.
No tinfoil hat is necessary for that. All you're doing there is making the observation that these companies are still living in the past, a past time when they had full control over distribution. It's a natural consequence they have no interest in correctly dealing with digital media, as you have pointed out. They have not decided that technological progress has created a different world with new possibilities, and that this means they should evaluate whether their business model is suited to this new world. Instead, they still want that old world where they have full control and they are willing to become adversaries to their own customers in order to preserve it. That is the actual problem. Rather than address this problem and become a joy to do business with, they want to apply a band-aid and this band-aid is called DRM. Other band-aids include wielding political clout to purchase laws that benefit their interests at the expense of others, and making monstrous "examples" by financially ruining the lives of people who have done very little harm to anyone. I cannot in any good conscience support this effort, nor any devices designed to promote it. It's not just that it isn't working, it's that it is wrong. No amount of convenience and no degree of music player reliability is going to change that.
I have no problem with DRM until it stops me from being able to use my media legally as I see fit. If a DRM scheme somehow prevented me from giving a file to my friends, but let me listen to the song on my ipod, Sansa, or Zune as I wished, that'd be perfectly okay. I don't mind buying products/services/licenses. The DRM that is demonized is the DRM that preemptively treats you like a criminal and unfairly restricts your usage of a PRODUCT THAT YOU PAID FOR THE USAGE OF.
Your post makes it sound like DRM is bad. BAD DRM is bad. Whether or not it can be effectively implemented is another issue; I know you couldn't magically detect the difference between a new media player and a friend's thumb drive.
All DRM is in fact bad because all DRM carries the assumption that you are incapable of doing the right thing and thus, must be actively prevented from doing the wrong thing. A DRM scheme that prevents you from giving a file to your friends is treating you like a criminal because the assumption behind it is that you WOULD give it to your friends -- they are so certain that you would do this, that they paid programmers to design a system to prevent it. To say that this restriction doesn't bother you because you wouldn't do that anyway misses the point. The point is that your morality means absolutely nothing if you have no ability to be immoral. To support any form of DRM is akin to saying that they are right to treat their customers in this adversarial, dehumanizing fashion.
DRM is power. It's power to control markets, to micromanage customers, to dictate obsolescence, and to hold content hostage. It's a power that comes with no concept of due process or innocent until proven guilty. It's a power that is "justified" by the fact that media companies have chosen not to create a business model suitable for the Information Age, which is no justification at all. It's a power that was not given to the companies willingly, but rather was one that they have taken for themselves. It was born not of overwhelming customer demand, but rather, a desire to control.
DRM is also a sad alternative to restoring the balance that once existed between the temporary monopoly granted by copyright and the benefit of society. Copyright was once only twelve years in duration, and this was when a mechanical printing press was the most technologically advanced method of distribution. We now have the ability to create and sell many more copies of a work in twelve years than we ever could have done before, yet copyright now has a ridiculous duration that has no concept of balance. It is plainly evident that you are dealing with people who are never going to be satisfied, for whom enough is never going to be enough.
The reason why so many no longer respect copyright is because it is no longer respectable. Those who choose to respect it anyway give it a benefit of doubt that the media companies are not willing to extend to their customers. Restoring the balance that once existed could create a world where people again respect copyright because they can see that it is reasonable and good. Such people would not want to infringe it, and thus, would need no restraints to prevent them from doing so. The fact that this simple, self-evident truth is so hard for so many to imagine is evidence enough that we have gone too far down this negative path that we are on. More DRM, no matter how benign, could only take us farther down that path.
Collectively, we generally don't appreciate and value what you describe there. The minority who does is probably small enough to be marginalized, though it does appear to be growing. That's the reason why (at least in the USA) it's so difficult to use any cellphone with any carrier's network, or why the most widely-used office software doesn't actively try to produce documents in a format that any other office software can use. There are many other examples.
Just as you have your frustrations with that, the phenomenon itself is born of a frustration with the media companies and their refusal to work with us instead of against us. That refusal is why the very interoperability you describe is not the norm. I will neither defend nor condemn piracy, but I will say that it sums up to a "fuck them then" sort of reaction that, from the perspective of human nature, is rather understandable or at least predictable. The media companies seriously believe that they can view their customers as a resource that they may take for granted, like so much lumber or iron ore.
They believe they can do so with impunity, and if not for piracy, they would mostly be correct. Again I am not going to say whether it's right or wrong, only that the very companies which complain about piracy have done much to set the stage for it and to create the ill will that makes people feel justified when they infringe these copyrights. No one does anything unless they believe, verily or falsely, that it is the right thing to do, or at least that it is wrong but either justifiable or serves some kind of greater good. Those snide remarks you mention come from this sense of feeling justified, though of course there are better expressions of the same sentiment.
Honestly, if you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to buy a zune or kindle. Boycotts are the only way these companies are gonna learn that customers won't tolerate DRM.
The possibility that concerns me is the other way that companies could handle that realization. They could design a DRM system that is generous on all counts, such that the average person has no pragmatic or material objection to its restrictions. This would make its adoption by customers much more widespread and would present the very convincing illusion of nullifying the arguments against DRM. Certainly it would nullify the reasons against it which are not rooted in principle. Effectively, that would cause people to willingly cede control to those companies so long as those companies put a smiling face on this process that is convincing enough, and that's a shame. In this way does our addiction to convenience and our superficial appreciation of only the most immediate concerns render us weak and able to be manipulated by those who claim to serve their customers.
I hope it doesn't sound like too minor of a gripe, but I greatly prefer to call it encumbered by DRM.
I hope the victory will be in the system no longer being able to pretend it is "for the people, by the people".
And then what? Just because people don't read /. doesn't mean they're stupid. They know what's going on as well as we do. Maybe they know it because their pension plans are gone or their kids are dead in a dummy war the US is fighting to keep the economy afloat. This broken system is the best we've got. No reform and no revolution could change that. What would you revolt into that would be incorruptible? People are incapable of governing themselves. Someday we'll design better people or machines who will be able to conquer and govern the rest of us effectively. Until then, just try to lay low.
I wouldn't try to make an incorruptible system. Until the general population becomes much more spiritual, understands why this has little or nothing to do with religion, truly loves their neighbors, and demands leaders of such attainments, you're never going to have that. Not while everything is one big business, nice and cold and impersonal and inhuman. I realize I am describing something that seems utterly impossible today, and many of you will prefer to find something wrong with it rather than dare to imagine it, just like I would have probably been laughed at had I talked to the ancient Romans about men flying in the skies and across oceans. If only our human aspirations were so high as our technical ones!
In the meantime, I would design a system that accounts for corruption. I'd probably start with the existing U.S. Constitution, only I'd add one amendment to it containing a mandatory procedure. Every 50 years, this would be the procedure:
I would add one other amendment to it. Under our current system, a person has to be convicted by a criminal law and in jeopardy of serving that sentence before they have a chance to challenge the constitutionality of that law. My amendment would state that if a politician votes for, sponsors, or otherwise officially supports a law in any way, and that law is later found to be unconstitutional and is overturned in court, that politician would automatically be required to serve whatever sentence the defendant was facing, be it a $100 fine or life in prison.
I'm sure there is room for improvement in my idea. The idea is that corruption has to establish itself and that establishment can be disrupted before it has much of a chance to take root. Every 50 years, you would have all of the benefits of the 1776 American Revolution except you would have them peacefully, legally, and without bloodshed. It would throw a "reset switch" on the federal level. I don't think this is necessary at the state level, because with those you can more ea
If accurate, that right there tells me that you were dealing with a passive person, a pushover or a lightweight or whatever you may call it. If he lacks his own understanding and his own perspective he's going to compete poorly against someone who has those things. That's one thing I very much like about argumentation: those who are not independent thinkers (the "sheeple" if you will) have a chance to discover why this is a significant disadvantage.
In my previous post, I mentioned talk-show hosts in particular because they have complete control of the forum and can steer the conversation whether the caller is aware of it and wishes it or not. The scenario you mention was between peers, which again indicates that you were dealing with a passive individual who was willing to let you have more than your share of control. In fact, he may not have seen that as a choice. Unless you have good reasons for it, it's generally poor strategy to allow your opponent to lead you and guide your moves as though he had your best interests at heart, as though he were not strongly interested in your failure. It generally does not occur to reactive people that responding in a predictable fashion makes them the effect of someone else's cause, nor do they seem to appreciate the full implications of this. It sounds like you gave him a lesson. I'll just say that whether you derived more enjoyment from shooting a fish in a barrel or from providing a valuable lesson is not for me to speculate.
Indeed. People like to believe that "the truth will win out", and it will, provided you love the truth more than you love to be entertained, more than you love showmanship, and more than you love to be told what you want to hear. There are a lot of people who would be quick to say that this describes them, mostly because it sounds good. It does not require great powers of observation to discern that unfortunately, only a minority of people truly understand this and really try to live like they understand it. Throwing money and power into the mix makes this much worse, not by changing the mechanics of the situation but by raising the stakes.
Some honest two-way dialog is what's needed, not preaching the old way.
I could be wrong but I think my first impression of the summary was somewhat like yours, though expressed differently. When I saw this part:
My first thought on reading that was "because a material impact is the only type they're capable of recognizing." I also have my doubts that their campaign is going to try to "change hearts and minds" with facts and reasoning. It's sort of like a debate which has an audience: if you're good, you can "win" a debate or an argument whether or not you are actually correct, particularly if your audience is naive, unfamiliar with argumentation and critical thinking, or has no independent understanding of the subject matter. Unfortunately, I think all three of those factors are working in favor of the *AAs. The Slashdot crowd is exceptional in many ways, but I would not expect the average person to be so familiar with these issues and many unrelated things remind me of the general public's lack of familiarity with argumentation and critical thinking.
Talk-show hosts do something similar all the time. They like to use the Socratic method not as a teaching tool, but to control the conversation by forcing the caller/guest into answering a series of simple questions that don't permit appreciation of differing viewpoints. Any attempts to suggest that the subject is more nuanced than this, that the questions don't cover the full scope of the issue, or that determing your conclusion prior to taking any other steps might be intellectually dishonest are dealt with. That's why the host's voice has a higher gain/volume than the caller's, why the host has a mute (or hold) button to instantly silence the caller, and is one (of several) reasons why calls are screened before being taken. Put those same hosts in a situation where they must interact as equals who cannot force the other person to submit to their control of the conversation and suddenly they'd have much greater difficulty seeming like they are always "right."
The situation with media campaigns is likewise asymmetric. The *AAs can easily afford to run these campaigns and get their side of the story into public view. Could you or I afford to produce and air our own commercials, on a national level, that argue against them and show any flaws in their reasoning? You mention two-way dialog. Imagine what it would do to all of PR and advertising if that were the norm.
Most of these discussions/arguments about Java are strictly concerning performance, like whether or not Java is bloated and slow. Your post there is one of the first I've seen that neatly answers the question of "why Java?" If it is as you say, then that's a highly desirable feature. That's especially when you consider the volume of personal information that's usually contained on a mobile phone, which I'd imagine would make it an attractive target for malware.
My understanding is that in most cases, a server is going to max out its disk I/O or its bandwidth before its CPU(s). That seems especially true to me for a Web server, since Javascript and other techniques delegate much of the processing to the clients.
I did have one question for you. In this post below, TheRaven64 stated:
I don't know much about Java but this got me curious. What does Java offer here that would be difficult (or impractical/impossible) to achieve with using syscall restrictions and other devices to sandbox the apps? With virtual memory and appropriate syscall restrictions that sounds like it should work too, and would make it easier to run native code, yet I don't hear of devices that use such an approach. Is it that both methods are equally viable, only with Java someone has already created an implementation that is useful for mobile phones so why reinvent the wheel? Or is Java's approach inherently superior in some way?
"...If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure -- news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy."
That is so true. Mere foreign news that, say, there's melamine in your food, or that a tsunami is on its way to your shores, should be ignored, nay, refused. Seen one tornado, seem 'em all, who gives a shit. (This is why philosophers have short lives and are ignored by the rest of humanity.)
And there's no need for more than one instance of any application, either. Thoreau lives!
I'm wondering if someone can so spectacularly fail to miss a point. If this is a troll, it's a pretty good one. What the hell, I'll bite ...
...
Clearly, recognizing that the news is rooted in gossip and has much in common with it means that we must eschew all information from anyone, even when it's a warning of an impending event. That's because there is no such thing as balance; we must go from one polar extreme (of a voracious appetite for all news) to the other (ignoring all outside information no matter what). Sure. False dichotomies are great! Or
When Paul Revere shouted "The British are coming!" that was a warning. When a major TV network says "$CELEBRITY is now undergoing her third divorce," that's news. Can we agree there is a difference between those two? Good. The latter case is what Thoreau was talking about, which is obvious, because assuming he's talking about anything else leads to the very objection you raised.
I don't understand why the author calls the foundational elements of game design atoms... I mean.. logically, an atom in this context would imply the simplest, well-formed concepts of game design that cannot be broken down any further. Concepts like "UI, inventory, power-ups, puzzles, conflicts" are generally abstract and can most certainly be broken down or interpreted differently. So, if the author needs a catchy buzzword label to define the content elements of his book... why choose a word that has scientific, logical and mathematical meaning? Meaning that conflicts with the intended meaning this label is supposed to define.
I think it's a requirement of buzzword-labels that they either make no sense or dilute the meaning of the original word, or both.
I don't believe it should take much to reach that point, either. To quote Henry David Thoreau (emphasis mine):
"And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure -- news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy."
The meaning of "acquainted with the principle" is such a contrast to the methods of learning-by-rote so common in education today. As in, I believe the latter is doing it the hard way for the dubious "benefit" of avoiding abstract thought. Subjectively, I can see a link between that rote learning and the repetition behind this kind of hype saturation. It's how people have been conditioned to acquire information and it's how you transform a message into something everybody knows about. As a consequence, we don't have many proactive people who like to discover things on their own; we have passive people who wait to be told what the next big thing is. Of course, that's synonymous with the next popular thing. So, I think backlashes against this kind of hype are overdue but it helps if they comet with an understanding of why companies use these methods and why they make money when they do.
Before this there was SARS, hoof-and-mouth, mad cow, West Nile virus, and probably others I am forgetting that were supposed to be huge deadly threats. The problem is that after those, that community or at least what the media makes of them starts to look like the boy who cried "wolf" too many times. If the next one really is the deadly pandemic threat, I wouldn't be surprised if the general public's attitude is "yeah, we've heard THAT before." Either this is institutionalized stupidity, deliberate in nature, or they have thought of this and believe that their status as experts and authorities somehow exempts them from the effects of basic human nature.
in our culture,
Kind of a stretch to call Ho Chi Minh City "our culture" when you're talking about the USA, no?
I didn't do a very good job of explaining how the silliness and security theater that is mostly being pioneered in the USA is now spreading even to distant nations with rather different beliefs such as Vietnam. As I did a poor job of that, I am glad you called me on it. I see all of that as a general process of decline that has no borders, though there are reasons why it happens in some places first and takes time to spread to others. To put that another way, while I can't prove it, I strongly suspect that, had the USA reacted in a completely rational, "real security and not security theater" sort of way to 9/11, others would have followed suit. Instead, we acquired a national willingness to let irrational fear rule the day and some years later we see these folks in Vietnam following our example instead of providing a counter-example. That's a shame because counter-examples that might put the lie to this hysteria are rather badly needed.
That culture I referred to was not specific to any one country (that'd be an improvement). I referred to Western culture in general. The only part I meant to be specific to the USA is that we in particular used to stand for something better than this. In a way, this is a commentary on how many traditionally non-Western nations are undergoing a process which could be called "Westernization", similar to what Japan and China have dealt with and continue to deal with. I don't consider Vietnam to be the world's only isolated island that is completely unaffected and uninfluenced by the cultures with which it interacts, in other words. The article/summary specifically mentioned travelers who had been to the US and Australia, so we are talking about people who are at least familiar with Western culture. And make no mistake; fascism is also without borders, or would like to be. Those who want it to happen to the USA would really love to see that spread throughout the world. That's just as emperors and dictators throughout history have dreamed of ruling the world, and several of them did rule the (known) world.
I hope that makes a bit more sense.
Why, at least since the War on (some) Drugs. You don't own your body if the government can tell you what you may or may not put into it. Likewise, you don't own your consciousness if the government can tell you that there are authorized and unauthorized ways of altering it. In both cases, you are more like a tenant of your body and of your mind, not an owner. That's one of the major reasons why you don't use manipulative social engineering to solve perceived problems, because it sets some very nasty precedents like this. Precedents which later generations, having few or no counter-examples, grow up to believe are normal and acceptable.
If the War on Drugs actually did anything to reduce the street availability of the substances it seeks to control (do the research; it hasn't), I might feel differently about it, though I doubt it because my opposition to it is rooted in principle. As it has failed to achieve its primary stated goals, I consider it completely without merit and its ill side-effects to be unjustifiable. Anyway, to answer your question, yes we have ceded control over our bodies to the government and we did it a long time ago. We traded it for a little safety that hasn't kept us any safer but has guaranteed a steady flow of money to various criminal organizations by means of the black market. Like anyone else who trades what is priceless for something that has a price, we got screwed. Not only is some buyer's remorse in order, it's long overdue.
Because in our culture, your security is something that is done to you, not something in which you are actively involved. Being actively involved in your own interests would be a microcosm of self-determination, self-government, personal responsibility, and individualism. You know, those things that this country used to be all about. There is currently something of a war against those things right now, and I believe it's because they are perceived as obstacles by those who would like to see fascism in the USA. To be correctly appreciated, this must be seen not as isolated issues, but in terms of a few basic principles that determine many aspects of life.
To put that another way, you know what would really stop terrorists from hijacking an airplane? Hundreds of well-armed passengers. And no, a bullet hole will not decompress an aircraft.
Fever can be caused by lots of things. H1N1 isn't the only possible fever-inducing pathogen, and you can even have fever without having an infection. Preventing people with fever from travelling seems kind of an overkill.
What you said and the mentality that would refer to this as "cheating" rather than "we need to implement a better way to screen for this, preferably one that fully informs the airline passengers of our intentions" reminded me of a joke. TSA = Thugs Standing Around.