I literally can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. For what it's worth, Russia's internet is likely even free-er than America's for the time being.
If Putin's party wouldn't win the elections, then the Communists would.
Sorry to bust your dreams, but there's no secret yet massive movement of the downtrodden in Russia just waiting elect someone who the West would deem "democratic", i.e. someone who would hold yard sales on Russia's natural resources and infrastructure. Kasparov, Yabloko and the like hold 1-5% support as far as anyone can tell, and are a distant fourth in line as far as potential alternatives to Putin.
That's untrue and something that gives a bad impression of agile software development.
To "code something up (using a lot of prints to debug)" means hacking, i.e. rigging software together with the emphasis of doing it as quickly as the intuition allows, at the expense of readability, reusability, reliability and ease of change.
Agile software development, in a nutshell, means acknowledging the fact that noone can really know what true final requirements for the eventual finished product are, so the idea is to start small and simple with a small feature set and gradually evolve into what the customer really wanted in the way of iterations - but at all times keeping the code tested, clean, readable, reusable and version controlled. It's about always having working version of the software, whose expected functionality can be demonstrated and verified with automatic tests, while using them to constantly refactor the code to better and clearer. It's about keeping the cost of changing the software low, while on the other hand, the cost of changing quickly hacked-together applications increases exponentially with complexity.
I disagree. OO design hasn't quite been as refined that well for that long, and the agile development paradigm was properly formulated in the early 2000s. Instead of mad EJB skills today you'd use Spring and whatnot. Even the IDEs have evolved a lot, and skills in using the newer tools affect productivity in a major way. Not to say core Java skills were useless, but a 10 year old skillset would have lost quite a bit in productivity and marketability.
Everybody else in the world, including all of America's enemies and people even in the most repressive countries, has access to those cables. How's forcing Americans to be ignorant of them help make America safer?
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The first IBM PC was released several years before Amiga, in 1981. By 1985 the PC world had ATs with 80286 processors and EGA. No doubt Amiga was still massively superior at multimedia at the time, but in the end, open architecture and expandability won.
Sadly the node couldn't be reinforced in time, as CCP's policy requires it to be done during the daily downtime. Yet thanks to a screwup by the original owners of the system, the attackers (in this battle) had only 12 hours to make their move and attack the system - not enough to wait for the next downtime and node reinforcement.
Sometimes the real life busts in and makes us painfully aware that some people have more, much more disposable income than others.
EVE Online's RMT system is by and large a brilliant idea. People who are so inclined, can buy virtual wealth for real world money, and people who are good at the game can play for free. The developers benefit either case. The vastness of EVE's playerbase however means it includes some individuals who are far, far ahead of the average on the income curve.
In the latest "Great War of EVE", a small Russian alliance RED.Overlord (ROL), with connections to virtual money farming industry, grew hostile with their neighbors, the largest player alliance Goonswarm. A certain VERY well off member of ROL then bought at least 500 billion ingame ISK (~$10k+ worth) from the black market to buy its alliancemates five Titan class capital ships (strategic weapons in EVE which take a lot of effort and 2 months of real time to build). CCP got a whiff of the transaction and banned all the titan pilots and their associates.
Unfettered, ROL's "mysterious benefactor" turned to legal means, and publicly sold 1000 real-money-bought timecards to fund its ingame war effort - a cool $27,000 worth. That is an undeniable fact, with sale threads still visible on EVE's official forums.
A harder to prove, but with the above in mind not the least unlikely, were his solid real-money-bribes to the leaders of other EVE alliances for help in the war. It's rumored that Evil Thug, the leader of a powerful Against All Authorities alliance, received a cool $30,000 bribe to turn his ingame organization against their former friends at Goonswarm, and there are more reliable information that certain leaders of other neighboring alliances received solid five-figure dollar bribes to either turn coat, or at the minimum stay neutral, in this purely ingame conflict. Perhaps interestingly, not many agreed.
Real life bribes don't as such have a lot to do with ingame RMT, but that's because the effect of ingame currency only goes so far, and rallying real people one way or the other is the true means to win.
If you read the negative comments here, you can easily spot the trend: "had high hopes, preordered the game, played for a month, it *sucked*, and even though I haven't touched it for a year I'm sure it still sucks (because I'll be damned if I give Funcom any money to try it again)".
At launch the game wasn't finished and complaints were grounded in reality. But the fact that Funcom has worked hard on the game for a year, fixing problems, adding content, rethinking bad design decisions and actually ended up with a polished, *genuinely good* MMORPG has gone completely unnoticed.
AOC's main problem isn't the game, but its public perception that was throughly ruined by the game's post-launch half-bakedness. If you ask newcomers who've just signed up to AOC about how they feel about it, they're usually having fun and are very much puzzled about the hate it's getting.
Funcom is facing a heck of a task battling people's existing prejudices in order to try and convince its 600,000 lost customers that they have indeed made the game playable and fun.
It's not because of the fact that the monument was placed elsewhere, but why. The government's excuses for transferring the country's most important WW2 monument, which had stood at its place with no problems for 60 years (including all the reindependence), was that the honorers of the monument were all communists, drunkards, desecrators of graves, and enemies of the state. Naturally, especially for Russians that came across as somewhat insulting.
It's worth a mention that developer rigging is a vastly bigger deal in a game like EVE, compared to other MMORPG's.
In other games, it's really not such a big deal if a developer joins a guild, observes how the content and game mechanics play out, maybe drops a few quest hints. Some people in a guild getting +3 swords instead of +2 thanks to subtle handholding will not make or break a game for anyone. Something like a developer using dev tools to join a guild and making himself an officer for 20 minutes is hardly anything earth-shattering in a game like World of Warcraft; heck, the members of the guild might be honored about it.
In EVE it's rather different, because it's a living, breathing and mercilessly unforgiving player-run world. In which a corporation can put months of gametime, tens of thousands of player-hours, not to mention thousands of real world US dollars (in black market value), into capital ships or a refining/ outposts in a system, only to utterly and irrevocably lose it in combat the next day.
Gaining officer access to a corporation would mean the person is able to conveniently pin-point where the capital ship assembly docks belonging to the corporation in question are located, and whether they in the middle of manufacturing supercapitals: the joint effort of hundreds, or thousands of players. If a competing corporation knows where the capital ship assembly dock is located, then it's already 80% of the effort of destroying, or at least disrupting it, as the defenses in any single outpost are limited by the game mechanics. Intelligence like actually is really valuable in this game, and can affect the joint efforts and gameplay results for thousands of players.
Having a GM join a corporation that deals with manufacturing such expensive capital ships, making himself an officer, and leaving 20 minutes later for no reason or explanation at all, deleting petitions and refusing in-game communication about it, PLUS the demonstrated ability of the largest enemy corporation to buddy up with developers as directly and as to get neutral observers banned, mean the allegations of developer rigging and misconduct in this case are very, very serious indeed.
Passing valuable intelligence to competing corporations, not to mention the earlier, previously proven (and iffily handled) developer misconduct regarding the same enemy corporation (like bestowing them blueprints, as in the ability to limitlessly manufacture, powerful vessels) -- does actually significantly affect the gameplay for thousands of paying customers.
Here's another Estonian perspective, to complement the "official" line above:
- The memory of WW2 is, hopefully obviously for most Slashdotters, very very important for all Russians wherever they may live.
- The monument in question was the prime memorial spot, primarily for the Russian population, to commemorate the war and the victory, in the country.
- The monument in question - quite inoffensive statue of a mourning soldier in Soviet uniform - had stood at its spot for 60 years, including all of Estonia's reindependence, with respect and dignity, without any problems, or almost anyone associating it with Communism.
- Some hardcore nationalists (some of whom could be considered neo-nazis) apparently disagreed, and had staged some earlier acts of vandalism against the monument, which in context, made it all the more dearer for those who held it dear for the local Russians.
- After another provocation on the 9th of May last year, the government basically simply assumed the so far ultranationalist stance, protesting not the provokers, or people who might be using the memory of WW2 for propaganda, but claiming that the *monument*, which had stood there just fine for many decades, had somehow, overnight, turned into a horrible symbol of Soviet repression, removal of which is supposedly a matter of honor and principle. Basically, very foolishly and irresponsibly, pitting the respect of WW2 against the respect for the country.
- Transferring a statue from one place to another might not seem to be such a big deal, but it's all about the context. The government basically agreed to the same stance the few neo-nazis in the country had, yet didn't make the slightest attempt to address the concerns of those (mainly Russians) who legitimately saw it as a symbol of defeat over Nazism, and had done so for decades. On the contrary, the honorers of the monument were smeared in the media and portrayed as drunks who use the war as an excuse to drunkenly dance on graves and to glorify the Soviet power. This ignorance and disrespect towards things the Russians hold dear, resonated deeply with other political issues, and the local Russians' feelings of inequality and guilt-tripping for things Stalin did before most of them were even born.
- As the government would *still* go on with the oh-so-inconsequential plan of transferring that sad statue to its new place, somehow figuring that using riot police and tear gas on the thousands protesters was justified... in order to appease a nationalist frenzy the government themselves had spun up. Rioting, looting and vandalism ensued. Not because of the statue, not because of the history, but out of hate for the government which, by removing the monument, the presumptions, excuses and justifications for doing so, demonstrated utter contempt and disregard towards the local Russian community, which then essentially responded with "f..k you".
Anyway, what I wanted to say as far as Slashdot is concerned:
Great majority of Russians are GENUINELY p...ed off against Estonia, not because of history, not because of the statue, but because of the hateful, spiteful attitude the government has displayed and keeps displaying towards its Russian countrymen, and which the removal of the statue, despite countless pleas, debates, warnings for the whole year, was a glaring testament of. According to the latest polls, only 6% of Russians on either side of the border agreed with the Estonian government's actions, and a whole lot more people are more upset than that.
Hence, it is more than likely that the DDOS attacks are in fact spontaneous activism, and not sponsored by Kremlin, which has different and less obvious means at its disposal.
I cannot understand the paranoia about ID cards. An ID card is just another form of identification, just like the driver's licence or the passport. You're not required to use an ID card any more than you are required to use the driver's licence or passport - as a form of ID they are interchangeable and any of them is legal ID in the real world.
In addition it has the added benefit of securely housing a private key pair, issued by a trusted third party, which cannot be snooped, at least not without physically obtaining and irreversibly and obviously destroying the card. This allows for extremely neat online services, since you (as a service provider) can securely identify a client for services that require privacy and identification, without ever seeing him in person and checking his ID. You could open bank accounts, do taxes, buy guns, display their phonecall or credit card logs, all the kind of things that you'd normally need to see the person in the flesh and check his ID for -- without ever meeting the person, or knowing anything at all about him beforehand, as the government has already done the identification for you.
It's strange that people are afraid of the government somehow learning more about you, or being able to track you somehow more than they can using credit cards. The government already knows you from when they issued your birth certificate, driver's licence and passport -- how do you suppose you're even considered a citizen? An ID card is just the same, except it has a key pair which you can use to identify yourself on websites that today would require in-the-flesh registration and code cards.
Trackers could as well poison their/announce pages with a fair amount of completely random IP's. It will only slow down the downloads slightly at the start if at all (mostly because of the 10-opening-connections thing in SP2). The "bad guys" cannot actually connect to those IPs/ports to be completely sure of sharing taking place, but unless they actually join each and every torrent and waited -- which is very unlikely and easy to detect if they did -- they will have to assume those users are simply behind a firewall.
The people who shoot them aren't actually shooting deer. They are shooting a robot. So how come those people charged for poaching, instead of just vandalism?
To hit every one of the 100 homes, it would take 1.3 to 2.6 miles of cable (depending on cable location). In a European city, this same amount of cable could easily cover 2-10X the # of families living in typical apartments/condos.
But lower population density doesn't actually matter that much, since not only aren't there any marked differences with regards to suburbs, but because the telephone and TV cables through which to offer broadband are already installed. Few people live in ranches 30 miles from the nearest center of civilization, where the population density is pronounced and acquiring a broadband connection could actually be a problem.
Why do the new Intel chipsets have just one P-ATA channel, if any at all? It is ridiculous. 95% of all optical drives are P-ATA, and P-ATA hard drives as of yet are just as fast, if not faster thanks to more mature drivers and technology, than their SATA counterparts. What do they expect people with 2+ perfectly fine last-generation PATA hard drives to do when upgrading to Core 2 Duo? Getting a separate PCI controller (as PCI-E x1 ones are still rare) to already expensive C2D motherboards with just 2 PCI slots, both of which a person could have a much better use for?
As an ID-card-carrying Estonian, I can't understand the commotion. A national ID card is just a piece of plastic, one that's more comfortable to carry than a passport, and doesn't necessarily mean you need to learn to drive to obtain it. It's a form of ID just like the ones you already have, except a that being a smart card it enables new possibilities for services requiring solid electronic authentication, such as online banking, doing taxes, checking your phone record or signing legally binding electronic contracts. It will not give the government any more information about you, because the government already knows and has always known everything the card is meant to convey. That is why you have to pay taxes, that is why you're not being deported for being an illegal immigrant.
An ID card will not add anything to the equation, unless they possibly start gathering biometric information for an ID card, but not for the passport or driver's license. A "mandatory" ID card will also not mean that everybody would have carry one around, lest they be denied of whatever services or god forbid arrested because they don't have one or don't want to show one; "mandatory" simply means that every citizen is expected to own one and keep it somewhere, so that service providers can make services and be sure that their clientele is able use them. Whatever real world event or location, such as dinner with the President, would require your authentication, any form of ID would do, just like it works today. It's just another, convenient form of ID that everybody already has, but which also enables neat, strongly authenticated electronic services.
BTW, the existing US system with the only half-heartedly secret SSN looks simply woefully ripe for identity theft.
As such, the system is decent. What remains a problem is that the specification is not legally binding. All the law says is "there can be electronic voting" in a few hundred words, but despite the process having been designed with security in mind, the law doesn't enforce how the electronic voting should take place exactly. For all intents and purposes, the government could just say, "hey let's just streamline the voting a bit and cut of those security checks there and here" and yield a 200% turnout or whatever, because the law doesn't specify how the voting should work.
Slashdot Mirror
I literally can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. For what it's worth, Russia's internet is likely even free-er than America's for the time being.
If Putin's party wouldn't win the elections, then the Communists would. Sorry to bust your dreams, but there's no secret yet massive movement of the downtrodden in Russia just waiting elect someone who the West would deem "democratic", i.e. someone who would hold yard sales on Russia's natural resources and infrastructure. Kasparov, Yabloko and the like hold 1-5% support as far as anyone can tell, and are a distant fourth in line as far as potential alternatives to Putin.
To "code something up (using a lot of prints to debug)" means hacking, i.e. rigging software together with the emphasis of doing it as quickly as the intuition allows, at the expense of readability, reusability, reliability and ease of change.
Agile software development, in a nutshell, means acknowledging the fact that noone can really know what true final requirements for the eventual finished product are, so the idea is to start small and simple with a small feature set and gradually evolve into what the customer really wanted in the way of iterations - but at all times keeping the code tested, clean, readable, reusable and version controlled. It's about always having working version of the software, whose expected functionality can be demonstrated and verified with automatic tests, while using them to constantly refactor the code to better and clearer. It's about keeping the cost of changing the software low, while on the other hand, the cost of changing quickly hacked-together applications increases exponentially with complexity.
It's literally a real life penis monster, like the ones people made with Spore creature creator and put on Youtube.
If the US blocks any web sites, the European governments should just block sites like Amazon or Ebay.
No, thank you.
I disagree. OO design hasn't quite been as refined that well for that long, and the agile development paradigm was properly formulated in the early 2000s. Instead of mad EJB skills today you'd use Spring and whatnot. Even the IDEs have evolved a lot, and skills in using the newer tools affect productivity in a major way. Not to say core Java skills were useless, but a 10 year old skillset would have lost quite a bit in productivity and marketability.
Everybody else in the world, including all of America's enemies and people even in the most repressive countries, has access to those cables. How's forcing Americans to be ignorant of them help make America safer?
The first IBM PC was released several years before Amiga, in 1981. By 1985 the PC world had ATs with 80286 processors and EGA. No doubt Amiga was still massively superior at multimedia at the time, but in the end, open architecture and expandability won.
Sadly the node couldn't be reinforced in time, as CCP's policy requires it to be done during the daily downtime. Yet thanks to a screwup by the original owners of the system, the attackers (in this battle) had only 12 hours to make their move and attack the system - not enough to wait for the next downtime and node reinforcement.
Sometimes the real life busts in and makes us painfully aware that some people have more, much more disposable income than others.
EVE Online's RMT system is by and large a brilliant idea. People who are so inclined, can buy virtual wealth for real world money, and people who are good at the game can play for free. The developers benefit either case. The vastness of EVE's playerbase however means it includes some individuals who are far, far ahead of the average on the income curve.
In the latest "Great War of EVE", a small Russian alliance RED.Overlord (ROL), with connections to virtual money farming industry, grew hostile with their neighbors, the largest player alliance Goonswarm. A certain VERY well off member of ROL then bought at least 500 billion ingame ISK (~$10k+ worth) from the black market to buy its alliancemates five Titan class capital ships (strategic weapons in EVE which take a lot of effort and 2 months of real time to build). CCP got a whiff of the transaction and banned all the titan pilots and their associates.
Unfettered, ROL's "mysterious benefactor" turned to legal means, and publicly sold 1000 real-money-bought timecards to fund its ingame war effort - a cool $27,000 worth. That is an undeniable fact, with sale threads still visible on EVE's official forums.
A harder to prove, but with the above in mind not the least unlikely, were his solid real-money-bribes to the leaders of other EVE alliances for help in the war. It's rumored that Evil Thug, the leader of a powerful Against All Authorities alliance, received a cool $30,000 bribe to turn his ingame organization against their former friends at Goonswarm, and there are more reliable information that certain leaders of other neighboring alliances received solid five-figure dollar bribes to either turn coat, or at the minimum stay neutral, in this purely ingame conflict. Perhaps interestingly, not many agreed.
Real life bribes don't as such have a lot to do with ingame RMT, but that's because the effect of ingame currency only goes so far, and rallying real people one way or the other is the true means to win.
If you read the negative comments here, you can easily spot the trend: "had high hopes, preordered the game, played for a month, it *sucked*, and even though I haven't touched it for a year I'm sure it still sucks (because I'll be damned if I give Funcom any money to try it again)".
At launch the game wasn't finished and complaints were grounded in reality. But the fact that Funcom has worked hard on the game for a year, fixing problems, adding content, rethinking bad design decisions and actually ended up with a polished, *genuinely good* MMORPG has gone completely unnoticed.
AOC's main problem isn't the game, but its public perception that was throughly ruined by the game's post-launch half-bakedness. If you ask newcomers who've just signed up to AOC about how they feel about it, they're usually having fun and are very much puzzled about the hate it's getting.
Funcom is facing a heck of a task battling people's existing prejudices in order to try and convince its 600,000 lost customers that they have indeed made the game playable and fun.
It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.
You're a bit confused. Bribing the Russian legislators wouldn't do much good because they're not really holding much power.
It comes with an SD card slot for your removable storage needs.
I transfer about 20 TB / day at work
Does your employer know you are?
It's not because of the fact that the monument was placed elsewhere, but why. The government's excuses for transferring the country's most important WW2 monument, which had stood at its place with no problems for 60 years (including all the reindependence), was that the honorers of the monument were all communists, drunkards, desecrators of graves, and enemies of the state. Naturally, especially for Russians that came across as somewhat insulting.
It's worth a mention that developer rigging is a vastly bigger deal in a game like EVE, compared to other MMORPG's.
In other games, it's really not such a big deal if a developer joins a guild, observes how the content and game mechanics play out, maybe drops a few quest hints. Some people in a guild getting +3 swords instead of +2 thanks to subtle handholding will not make or break a game for anyone. Something like a developer using dev tools to join a guild and making himself an officer for 20 minutes is hardly anything earth-shattering in a game like World of Warcraft; heck, the members of the guild might be honored about it.
In EVE it's rather different, because it's a living, breathing and mercilessly unforgiving player-run world. In which a corporation can put months of gametime, tens of thousands of player-hours, not to mention thousands of real world US dollars (in black market value), into capital ships or a refining/ outposts in a system, only to utterly and irrevocably lose it in combat the next day.
Gaining officer access to a corporation would mean the person is able to conveniently pin-point where the capital ship assembly docks belonging to the corporation in question are located, and whether they in the middle of manufacturing supercapitals: the joint effort of hundreds, or thousands of players. If a competing corporation knows where the capital ship assembly dock is located, then it's already 80% of the effort of destroying, or at least disrupting it, as the defenses in any single outpost are limited by the game mechanics. Intelligence like actually is really valuable in this game, and can affect the joint efforts and gameplay results for thousands of players.
Having a GM join a corporation that deals with manufacturing such expensive capital ships, making himself an officer, and leaving 20 minutes later for no reason or explanation at all, deleting petitions and refusing in-game communication about it, PLUS the demonstrated ability of the largest enemy corporation to buddy up with developers as directly and as to get neutral observers banned, mean the allegations of developer rigging and misconduct in this case are very, very serious indeed.
Passing valuable intelligence to competing corporations, not to mention the earlier, previously proven (and iffily handled) developer misconduct regarding the same enemy corporation (like bestowing them blueprints, as in the ability to limitlessly manufacture, powerful vessels) -- does actually significantly affect the gameplay for thousands of paying customers.
Here's another Estonian perspective, to complement the "official" line above:
- The memory of WW2 is, hopefully obviously for most Slashdotters, very very important for all Russians wherever they may live.
- The monument in question was the prime memorial spot, primarily for the Russian population, to commemorate the war and the victory, in the country.
- The monument in question - quite inoffensive statue of a mourning soldier in Soviet uniform - had stood at its spot for 60 years, including all of Estonia's reindependence, with respect and dignity, without any problems, or almost anyone associating it with Communism.
- Some hardcore nationalists (some of whom could be considered neo-nazis) apparently disagreed, and had staged some earlier acts of vandalism against the monument, which in context, made it all the more dearer for those who held it dear for the local Russians.
- After another provocation on the 9th of May last year, the government basically simply assumed the so far ultranationalist stance, protesting not the provokers, or people who might be using the memory of WW2 for propaganda, but claiming that the *monument*, which had stood there just fine for many decades, had somehow, overnight, turned into a horrible symbol of Soviet repression, removal of which is supposedly a matter of honor and principle. Basically, very foolishly and irresponsibly, pitting the respect of WW2 against the respect for the country.
- Transferring a statue from one place to another might not seem to be such a big deal, but it's all about the context. The government basically agreed to the same stance the few neo-nazis in the country had, yet didn't make the slightest attempt to address the concerns of those (mainly Russians) who legitimately saw it as a symbol of defeat over Nazism, and had done so for decades. On the contrary, the honorers of the monument were smeared in the media and portrayed as drunks who use the war as an excuse to drunkenly dance on graves and to glorify the Soviet power. This ignorance and disrespect towards things the Russians hold dear, resonated deeply with other political issues, and the local Russians' feelings of inequality and guilt-tripping for things Stalin did before most of them were even born.
- As the government would *still* go on with the oh-so-inconsequential plan of transferring that sad statue to its new place, somehow figuring that using riot police and tear gas on the thousands protesters was justified... in order to appease a nationalist frenzy the government themselves had spun up. Rioting, looting and vandalism ensued. Not because of the statue, not because of the history, but out of hate for the government which, by removing the monument, the presumptions, excuses and justifications for doing so, demonstrated utter contempt and disregard towards the local Russian community, which then essentially responded with "f..k you".
Anyway, what I wanted to say as far as Slashdot is concerned:
Great majority of Russians are GENUINELY p...ed off against Estonia, not because of history, not because of the statue, but because of the hateful, spiteful attitude the government has displayed and keeps displaying towards its Russian countrymen, and which the removal of the statue, despite countless pleas, debates, warnings for the whole year, was a glaring testament of. According to the latest polls, only 6% of Russians on either side of the border agreed with the Estonian government's actions, and a whole lot more people are more upset than that.
Hence, it is more than likely that the DDOS attacks are in fact spontaneous activism, and not sponsored by Kremlin, which has different and less obvious means at its disposal.
I cannot understand the paranoia about ID cards. An ID card is just another form of identification, just like the driver's licence or the passport. You're not required to use an ID card any more than you are required to use the driver's licence or passport - as a form of ID they are interchangeable and any of them is legal ID in the real world.
In addition it has the added benefit of securely housing a private key pair, issued by a trusted third party, which cannot be snooped, at least not without physically obtaining and irreversibly and obviously destroying the card. This allows for extremely neat online services, since you (as a service provider) can securely identify a client for services that require privacy and identification, without ever seeing him in person and checking his ID. You could open bank accounts, do taxes, buy guns, display their phonecall or credit card logs, all the kind of things that you'd normally need to see the person in the flesh and check his ID for -- without ever meeting the person, or knowing anything at all about him beforehand, as the government has already done the identification for you.
It's strange that people are afraid of the government somehow learning more about you, or being able to track you somehow more than they can using credit cards. The government already knows you from when they issued your birth certificate, driver's licence and passport -- how do you suppose you're even considered a citizen? An ID card is just the same, except it has a key pair which you can use to identify yourself on websites that today would require in-the-flesh registration and code cards.
Trackers could as well poison their /announce pages with a fair amount of completely random IP's. It will only slow down the downloads slightly at the start if at all (mostly because of the 10-opening-connections thing in SP2). The "bad guys" cannot actually connect to those IPs/ports to be completely sure of sharing taking place, but unless they actually join each and every torrent and waited -- which is very unlikely and easy to detect if they did -- they will have to assume those users are simply behind a firewall.
The people who shoot them aren't actually shooting deer. They are shooting a robot. So how come those people charged for poaching, instead of just vandalism?
But lower population density doesn't actually matter that much, since not only aren't there any marked differences with regards to suburbs, but because the telephone and TV cables through which to offer broadband are already installed. Few people live in ranches 30 miles from the nearest center of civilization, where the population density is pronounced and acquiring a broadband connection could actually be a problem.
Why do the new Intel chipsets have just one P-ATA channel, if any at all? It is ridiculous. 95% of all optical drives are P-ATA, and P-ATA hard drives as of yet are just as fast, if not faster thanks to more mature drivers and technology, than their SATA counterparts. What do they expect people with 2+ perfectly fine last-generation PATA hard drives to do when upgrading to Core 2 Duo? Getting a separate PCI controller (as PCI-E x1 ones are still rare) to already expensive C2D motherboards with just 2 PCI slots, both of which a person could have a much better use for?
An ID card will not add anything to the equation, unless they possibly start gathering biometric information for an ID card, but not for the passport or driver's license. A "mandatory" ID card will also not mean that everybody would have carry one around, lest they be denied of whatever services or god forbid arrested because they don't have one or don't want to show one; "mandatory" simply means that every citizen is expected to own one and keep it somewhere, so that service providers can make services and be sure that their clientele is able use them. Whatever real world event or location, such as dinner with the President, would require your authentication, any form of ID would do, just like it works today. It's just another, convenient form of ID that everybody already has, but which also enables neat, strongly authenticated electronic services.
BTW, the existing US system with the only half-heartedly secret SSN looks simply woefully ripe for identity theft.
As such, the system is decent. What remains a problem is that the specification is not legally binding. All the law says is "there can be electronic voting" in a few hundred words, but despite the process having been designed with security in mind, the law doesn't enforce how the electronic voting should take place exactly. For all intents and purposes, the government could just say, "hey let's just streamline the voting a bit and cut of those security checks there and here" and yield a 200% turnout or whatever, because the law doesn't specify how the voting should work.
Aren't public libraries exempt from copyright laws? If that's also the case in the United States, perhaps archive.org can make a case for it.