What was that book where the government switches its ever-lasting war to different far off countries and the population never seems to care or even notice?
The idea of a rooftop air terminal was later resurrected with the construction of a helipad on top of the nearby Pan-Am building, which also proved to be extremely dangerous,
I thought helipads on corporate skyscraper rooftops were quite common? Or do I watch too many movies? (Disclaimer: I live in the Midwest.)
- Super Nintendo - inferior to the Genesis' 32-bit capability
Say what? The Genesis was a fine machine, but it was only 16-bit as well. The SNES had the technical lead in every category. Higher-resolution video modes with more colors, PCM sounds instead of FM synth. Unless you're talking about the 32X, which failed to live up to all the hype and was ultimately a failure in the marketplace.
To maximize this use, a developer must at least pay lip service to documentation and UI testing.
Many developers never make this conceptual leap, however.
Many developers don't care. And releasing their software as open source allows them not to care. By giving away their code, they're allowing those who do care to add their own improvements to the documentation and UI and contribute those improvements back to the project. If I released an open source application for free and someone came up to me asking "Where's the documentation? Where's the UI Testing?" I would tell them, "I should ask you the same thing."
This is a good point - if software doesn't explain itself, then it is broken. I believe this holds all the way from the top level to the basics. If the architecture of the system isn't well signposted and comprehensible, it fails.
If you're talking about everyday desktop software for non-geeks, then sure. But you have to take your audience into consideration too. There is plenty of software out there for people who know what they're doing, and any hand-holding at all will only get in the way of what they're trying to do. Take Blender, for instance. Its user interface is completely different from any other piece of software and is tough to master. But it is optimized for the job of 3D modeling and experienced graphics designers can fly through it with ease.
Another example: I'm trying to get into music production and recently bought a Korg Electribe EMX-1. It's basically a drum machine, synthesizer, and sequencer all mashed into one. You look at it and despite all the knobs and buttons think to yourself, "I've built around 200 different servers from scratch in my day job as a sysadmin, how hard can a little blue box be?" Well, I've been reading the manual two nights straight and have only managed to digest about half of what this machine can do. It's tough because I come from the computer world where a button widget does one thing. On the EMX-1, each button and knob does anywhere between 2 and 50 things depending on what mode you're in, which thingamabob is toggled, or who breathed on it last. Producers have no problem with it though, because it was designed for someone with a solid understanding of music production under their belt already. If Korg were to dumb the instrument down at all, they would either have to remove functionality or increase the cost of the device, neither of which are attractive or necessary.
Heck, without RMS and the GPL, Linux would not exist
I hate it when people say this.
Linus released the first version kernel long before it was associated with GNU. If RMS and GNU hadn't been around, it's likely that Linux would have depended on Minix a little while longer. Or perhaps the early developers would have cobbled together their own userland somehow. Perhaps Linus would have gotten discouraged and the open source community would end up coalescing around FreeBSD instead. There are too many geeks who believe that their entire computing experience shouldn't be dependent on proprietary vendors. A free OS was bound to come along eventually.
Did RMS make a significant contribution to free and open source software? Undoubtedly. Would the community still exist without him? Absolutely.
I've always wondered whether the reason that the linux kernel has so few forks is due to the gpl.
The Linux kernel has loads of forks. Every actively maintained Linux distribution has its own fork of the kernel with a particular set of configuration changes, build tweaks, and source code patches. Additionally, many high-profile kernel hackers maintain their own public kernel tree to vet or test patches that might eventually make it up into the mainline kernel.
They bitch about Google and other content providers somehow basically taking advantage of their networks
I hate this sooooo much. If I ever meet a telco exec that says this, I will seriously, honestly, punch him in his face for being such an idiot. Look it's this simple:
Google pays their ISPs for their (mostly) outgoing data.
Google users pay their ISP for their (mostly) incoming data.
Is it really that hard to understand? Who is getting cheated here? Who is being taken advantage of? To charge both your users and Google is some serious double-dipping. Likewise, threatening to intentionally degrade a service to their customers because the content provider didn't pay up is flat out mob-style extortion.
I really hope this FCC chairman means what he says and has the cahones to tell the telcos and cable operators where to go because up to this point they've been controlling the very regulatory agency that's supposed to control them.
However, portraying it as incredibly easy to use with everything you'd want out of a desktop operating system is just false advertising for 95% of computer users out there.
I have to disagree here. Linux is perfect for 95% of computer users out there because that 95% are the ones who generally only use a web browser, an office suite, and *maybe* an email or IM client. All of the basic everyday desktop apps are there. Hardware compatibility is, to a very large degree, not a problem anymore. Community support is excellent and any modern distro ships with an easy-to-use desktop for managing your data and the system as a whole. Installing new software is much simpler than on Windows or Mac, because all you have to do is open your package manager, click a few buttons, and the software is installed and ready to use. (I've impressed more than a few people installing KMyMoney this way.)
These days, when people say Linux isn't ready for the population at large, they cite things like Photoshop. Well, Photoshop is not a general-purpose tool at all, it's meant for graphics designers who tweak photos all day long. Simple photo manipulation can be done with GIMP or scores of other easier-to-use tools. Gaming? Well, gaming is a not general-purpose computing either. Serious gamers load their systems up with expensive whiz-bang hardware and brand-new games and the developers of both of these don't usually target Linux because their core market isn't using it.
But Linux has been able to handle your day-to-day desktop computing tasks for years. And in many ways, it handles them better than the proprietary alternatives can.
To her credit, Kim Komando has been doing a home computer radio show since well before computers and the Internet were mainstream. However, if you actually listen to one of her shows, you notice that her knowledge hasn't kept pace with current technology and most of her advice boils down to either reinstalling windows or buying products from her sponsors to (possibly) fix your problem.
I applaud Ken Starks for putting this ad on the air. Most of her listeners would do well to give Linux a try. Although her audience would shrink a bit when their computers started working properly all of the sudden.;)
The concept of micropayments in the context of content has been a pipe dream for over a decade now. To businesspeople, it's one of those ideas that's so appealing they just can't let it go because they can't grasp just how complex a system it is, and how many people will simply say, "no thanks," because they don't want to feel like they're being nickeled-and-dimed to death for something they're used to getting for free. Micropayments have enjoyed some success in online gaming, but will never work in the news biz because for every site that will charge for articles, you'll find four more giving roughly the same thing away for free and living off the advertising alone.
I don't know what the future of journalism will look like, but I can tell you that it won't involve charging the end user per-article payments or subscriptions. Anyone who thinks either of those will work for the industry as a whole in the long term is either blinded by greed or on crack.
I've been unwillingly paying the Microsoft tax for TEN YEARS.
Sweet Lord Baby Jesus, why? It's been possible to get barebones computers with no OS for much longer than a decade. It takes close to zero effort or knowledge to put in a hard disk, memory, and CPU, and fire the system up for OS install.
If you're talking about laptops, there have been vendors that specialize in Linux laptops for years. They are almost a moot point now, however, with most major OEMs starting to preload Linux on their x86 laptops and netbooks despite licensing threats from Microsoft.
Guy A infringes on Guy B's copyright. Guy B calls out Guy A on Twitter. Guy A removes the infringed images.
I at least expected 4-5 cross-referenced blog posts from each party containing legal threats and shouting about what a tool the other was. Instead, the situation was resolved amicably. Yawn. Call me when Kanye West does something retarded again.
I've been running Linux on my machines for 13 years. I generally seek out an open source solution for everything I do because its cheaper, generally more reliable, and puts me in control of my technology.
That said, I recently installed Windows for the first time in years. Why? I've taken an interest in music production and the Linux tools just aren't up to par yet. Yes, the basic underlying systems (Jack, various libraries, hardware support) are often far superior to commercial operating systems, but there's really no good way to hit the ground running when making music in Linux. All of the applications support different ways of pushing sound in and out, and many of them have a good foundation but lack in too many areas. Additionally, many of the packages that ship in distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are woefully out of date. And finally, there is very little in the way of commercial audio offerings on Linux.
Now, don't take this as complaining. I spent the better part of a month trying to get things like the real-time kernel, Jack, and various applications and plugins to work properly with little success. I've lambasted plenty of posters here on Slashdot for trying one Linux distro, finding out that their wireless card didn't work right away, and then gave up running back to Windows or OS X whilst screaming all the way. This is more like wishful thinking. I would gladly help fix the problems that Linux has on the audio front, but I have neither the time nor experience and likely never will. I'm not happy about having to pay good money for proprietary software, but in the end, using the software that does the right job is more important to me.
In the meantime, I'll continue to hope that someday, someone does for the Linux audio ecosystem what Ubuntu did for the Linux desktop.
You found out that the open source one contained vulnerabilities (by reviewing the code after it was compromised), but how would you be able to tell whether any of the closed source alternatives are any more secure?
1. Lack of user-testing 2. Incomplete, incomprehensible, multi-format documentation. 3. Lack of quality control (eg. automated testing)
These are all problems with poorly-managed commercial software projects as well. The advantage to open source applications is that if you find value in the software but find some parts of it are lacking (features, stability, etc), you're completely free to modify and improve it however you like.
4. Unannounced drop of support on certain projects.
Oh yeah, that's not a problem with proprietary software at all. The commercial software landscape is rife with products that were completely abandoned because they turned out to be not profitable enough, the company went out of business, or the product was axed by management for no discernible reason. With open source software, anyone can pick up support on a project where the maintainers left off.
5. A plethora of linux distributions makes it difficult to choose.
Not really, you just pick one and go. If you don't like it, try another one. It's hardly a life-or-death decision. Most Linux distros do roughly the same thing anyway, so you just pick one that's fairly popular for the task at hand (desktop, server, multimedia, voip, embedded, whatever). If you don't like something about Linux, there's always BSD or OpenSolaris as well and all three of these are largely compatible and inter-operable with each other. In the proprietary OS world, there are really only two options: Windows and OS X. If you try out Windows and find that it doesn't suit your needs, it's not like you can return it to the store and buy some other company's version of Windows. Ditto for OS X.
6. Too many configuration formats.
I'll grant you that it would be nice if there were more of an effort on standardization here, but this is kinda like asking for world peace. Most of the mature open source software that ships on a Linux distribution has a long history, much of it pre-dating Linux. And one config format does not suit all purposes. In any event, the situation is even worse on platforms like Windows because there often is no way to script or automate configuration whereas on Linux, almost every app can be configured via a text file somewhere or at least via the command line.
Where I work, we've deployed thousands of Linux and Windows machines. Our process for deploying Linux on new machines is pretty straightforward: plug a box into the network and power it on. The installer boots automatically, installs a pre-defined set of packages, and detects and applies the configuration all with zero user intervention. For each Windows server we deploy, someone has to run the installer and then install and configure each package by hand, usually with several reboots involved. It's about 3 hours of pointing and clicking minimum.
7. The UNIX framework is not mature anymore and because of its design flaws, responds horribly to new demands.
Not mature anymore? How does something get un-mature? Which design flaws do you speak of? UNIX had its beginnings in the 1960's and I daresay there are few software designs that have lasted this long, and certainly no other operating systems. UNIX-like systems are still in use today precisely because they scale so well. UNIX is the single most flexible software framework in the world. These days you find it on mainframes, servers, desktops, routers, phones, video game consoles, e-book readers. It's what powers the massive cloud systems at Google, Amazon, and others thanks to the powerful virtualization options that Linux affords. The Internet was based on and continues to operate almost entirely on UNIX-like systems.
8. Too many different programming languages make it difficult for new talent to drop in or to integrate different approaches.
Well, why not? The Twitter service, and anything you do with it, belongs to the people that own the service. They get to call the shots. Anyone who doesn't like it shouldn't use Twitter (or any other service owned by someone else), end of story.
(And before anyone draws the comparison, this argument wouldn't hold for an ISP because there's only one Internet and it is--or should be--a wholly public resource and remain strictly neutral in regards to the content passed around on any section of it.)
Steve Rambam, a private investigator, gives talks at the 2600 HOPE conferences. In 2006, he gave a talk called, "Privacy is Dead, Get Over It." He makes a convincing case that in the age of the Internet, 20 bucks will get you access to everything you ever wanted to know about someone. Not just pseudo-personal information like address, date of birth, SSN, phone numbers, and so on, but their complete financial history including credit records, bank accounts, loans, and major purchases; magazine subscriptions; utility bills; memberships in various organizations, clubs, and charities; travel itineraries, you name it. Private companies have been compiling information from public, commercial, and government sources over the last decade and have gotten astonishingly good at assembling a complete profile of practically every person in western society. And there's no way to opt out or tell them to stop it because it's all perfectly legal. (The CIA and FBI are their biggest customers.) He also notes that sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are a private investigator's wet dream because people (even criminals) literally put all of their interests, activities, photos, relationships, and thoughts right up there on the Internet for everyone to see. (Or subpoena.)
At the 2008 conference, he told the story about he and a journalist friend played a game of hide and seek. The journalist (I don't recall his name) said that he could disappear from Steve's radar and Steve said, "bring it on." I wish I could remember all of the details, but the gist is that the journalist, despite his very best efforts, he couldn't stay hidden. He used aliases and even opened up bank accounts in foreign countries. It's a terrific speech and you can hear it here.
Okay then, I will: The "Church" of Scientology is notorious for harassing critics into silence. People who have written unflattering papers, articles, or pieces on the Co$ have found their property repeatedly vandalized. They make calls to your employer (or customers), spread rumors both online and off, and interrogate your relatives while posing as federal officers.
There's a reason the Anonymous protests from a couple years ago were semi-effective: all of the protesters wore masks before, during, and after the protest to conceal their identities. The best the Co$ could do to counter this was write down the license plate numbers of the protesters where they could or goad the loudest protesters into taking off their masks. I can't find the link now, but I seem to recall that after these protests, the Co$ tried to get laws passed in many major cities prohibiting protesters from wearing masks.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the new war, same as the old one.
What was that book where the government switches its ever-lasting war to different far off countries and the population never seems to care or even notice?
I thought helipads on corporate skyscraper rooftops were quite common? Or do I watch too many movies? (Disclaimer: I live in the Midwest.)
Say what? The Genesis was a fine machine, but it was only 16-bit as well. The SNES had the technical lead in every category. Higher-resolution video modes with more colors, PCM sounds instead of FM synth. Unless you're talking about the 32X, which failed to live up to all the hype and was ultimately a failure in the marketplace.
If a user is comfortable using and paying for Windows, then they should just stick with it and everybody will be happy.
If they want something better, they're going to have to take the initiative to actually learn something better.
Many developers don't care. And releasing their software as open source allows them not to care. By giving away their code, they're allowing those who do care to add their own improvements to the documentation and UI and contribute those improvements back to the project. If I released an open source application for free and someone came up to me asking "Where's the documentation? Where's the UI Testing?" I would tell them, "I should ask you the same thing."
If you're talking about everyday desktop software for non-geeks, then sure. But you have to take your audience into consideration too. There is plenty of software out there for people who know what they're doing, and any hand-holding at all will only get in the way of what they're trying to do. Take Blender, for instance. Its user interface is completely different from any other piece of software and is tough to master. But it is optimized for the job of 3D modeling and experienced graphics designers can fly through it with ease.
Another example: I'm trying to get into music production and recently bought a Korg Electribe EMX-1. It's basically a drum machine, synthesizer, and sequencer all mashed into one. You look at it and despite all the knobs and buttons think to yourself, "I've built around 200 different servers from scratch in my day job as a sysadmin, how hard can a little blue box be?" Well, I've been reading the manual two nights straight and have only managed to digest about half of what this machine can do. It's tough because I come from the computer world where a button widget does one thing. On the EMX-1, each button and knob does anywhere between 2 and 50 things depending on what mode you're in, which thingamabob is toggled, or who breathed on it last. Producers have no problem with it though, because it was designed for someone with a solid understanding of music production under their belt already. If Korg were to dumb the instrument down at all, they would either have to remove functionality or increase the cost of the device, neither of which are attractive or necessary.
I hate it when people say this.
Linus released the first version kernel long before it was associated with GNU. If RMS and GNU hadn't been around, it's likely that Linux would have depended on Minix a little while longer. Or perhaps the early developers would have cobbled together their own userland somehow. Perhaps Linus would have gotten discouraged and the open source community would end up coalescing around FreeBSD instead. There are too many geeks who believe that their entire computing experience shouldn't be dependent on proprietary vendors. A free OS was bound to come along eventually.
Did RMS make a significant contribution to free and open source software? Undoubtedly. Would the community still exist without him? Absolutely.
The Linux kernel has loads of forks. Every actively maintained Linux distribution has its own fork of the kernel with a particular set of configuration changes, build tweaks, and source code patches. Additionally, many high-profile kernel hackers maintain their own public kernel tree to vet or test patches that might eventually make it up into the mainline kernel.
BSD has only a handful of forks by comparison.
I hate this sooooo much. If I ever meet a telco exec that says this, I will seriously, honestly, punch him in his face for being such an idiot. Look it's this simple:
Is it really that hard to understand? Who is getting cheated here? Who is being taken advantage of? To charge both your users and Google is some serious double-dipping. Likewise, threatening to intentionally degrade a service to their customers because the content provider didn't pay up is flat out mob-style extortion.
I really hope this FCC chairman means what he says and has the cahones to tell the telcos and cable operators where to go because up to this point they've been controlling the very regulatory agency that's supposed to control them.
I have to disagree here. Linux is perfect for 95% of computer users out there because that 95% are the ones who generally only use a web browser, an office suite, and *maybe* an email or IM client. All of the basic everyday desktop apps are there. Hardware compatibility is, to a very large degree, not a problem anymore. Community support is excellent and any modern distro ships with an easy-to-use desktop for managing your data and the system as a whole. Installing new software is much simpler than on Windows or Mac, because all you have to do is open your package manager, click a few buttons, and the software is installed and ready to use. (I've impressed more than a few people installing KMyMoney this way.)
These days, when people say Linux isn't ready for the population at large, they cite things like Photoshop. Well, Photoshop is not a general-purpose tool at all, it's meant for graphics designers who tweak photos all day long. Simple photo manipulation can be done with GIMP or scores of other easier-to-use tools. Gaming? Well, gaming is a not general-purpose computing either. Serious gamers load their systems up with expensive whiz-bang hardware and brand-new games and the developers of both of these don't usually target Linux because their core market isn't using it.
But Linux has been able to handle your day-to-day desktop computing tasks for years. And in many ways, it handles them better than the proprietary alternatives can.
"Pretty much the only thing that Linux needs now is you" is a good marketing campaign.
To her credit, Kim Komando has been doing a home computer radio show since well before computers and the Internet were mainstream. However, if you actually listen to one of her shows, you notice that her knowledge hasn't kept pace with current technology and most of her advice boils down to either reinstalling windows or buying products from her sponsors to (possibly) fix your problem.
I applaud Ken Starks for putting this ad on the air. Most of her listeners would do well to give Linux a try. Although her audience would shrink a bit when their computers started working properly all of the sudden. ;)
I'll see your letter of the law, and raise you a reality
The concept of micropayments in the context of content has been a pipe dream for over a decade now. To businesspeople, it's one of those ideas that's so appealing they just can't let it go because they can't grasp just how complex a system it is, and how many people will simply say, "no thanks," because they don't want to feel like they're being nickeled-and-dimed to death for something they're used to getting for free. Micropayments have enjoyed some success in online gaming, but will never work in the news biz because for every site that will charge for articles, you'll find four more giving roughly the same thing away for free and living off the advertising alone.
I don't know what the future of journalism will look like, but I can tell you that it won't involve charging the end user per-article payments or subscriptions. Anyone who thinks either of those will work for the industry as a whole in the long term is either blinded by greed or on crack.
I'm still puzzled as to why it isn't universally acknowledged that corporate political campaign donations are the purest form of bribery.
Sweet Lord Baby Jesus, why? It's been possible to get barebones computers with no OS for much longer than a decade. It takes close to zero effort or knowledge to put in a hard disk, memory, and CPU, and fire the system up for OS install.
If you're talking about laptops, there have been vendors that specialize in Linux laptops for years. They are almost a moot point now, however, with most major OEMs starting to preload Linux on their x86 laptops and netbooks despite licensing threats from Microsoft.
I can tell they were targeting the auto-enthusiast crowd with that name.
Guy A infringes on Guy B's copyright.
Guy B calls out Guy A on Twitter.
Guy A removes the infringed images.
I at least expected 4-5 cross-referenced blog posts from each party containing legal threats and shouting about what a tool the other was. Instead, the situation was resolved amicably. Yawn. Call me when Kanye West does something retarded again.
I've been running Linux on my machines for 13 years. I generally seek out an open source solution for everything I do because its cheaper, generally more reliable, and puts me in control of my technology.
That said, I recently installed Windows for the first time in years. Why? I've taken an interest in music production and the Linux tools just aren't up to par yet. Yes, the basic underlying systems (Jack, various libraries, hardware support) are often far superior to commercial operating systems, but there's really no good way to hit the ground running when making music in Linux. All of the applications support different ways of pushing sound in and out, and many of them have a good foundation but lack in too many areas. Additionally, many of the packages that ship in distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are woefully out of date. And finally, there is very little in the way of commercial audio offerings on Linux.
Now, don't take this as complaining. I spent the better part of a month trying to get things like the real-time kernel, Jack, and various applications and plugins to work properly with little success. I've lambasted plenty of posters here on Slashdot for trying one Linux distro, finding out that their wireless card didn't work right away, and then gave up running back to Windows or OS X whilst screaming all the way. This is more like wishful thinking. I would gladly help fix the problems that Linux has on the audio front, but I have neither the time nor experience and likely never will. I'm not happy about having to pay good money for proprietary software, but in the end, using the software that does the right job is more important to me.
In the meantime, I'll continue to hope that someday, someone does for the Linux audio ecosystem what Ubuntu did for the Linux desktop.
You found out that the open source one contained vulnerabilities (by reviewing the code after it was compromised), but how would you be able to tell whether any of the closed source alternatives are any more secure?
These are all problems with poorly-managed commercial software projects as well. The advantage to open source applications is that if you find value in the software but find some parts of it are lacking (features, stability, etc), you're completely free to modify and improve it however you like.
Oh yeah, that's not a problem with proprietary software at all. The commercial software landscape is rife with products that were completely abandoned because they turned out to be not profitable enough, the company went out of business, or the product was axed by management for no discernible reason. With open source software, anyone can pick up support on a project where the maintainers left off.
Not really, you just pick one and go. If you don't like it, try another one. It's hardly a life-or-death decision. Most Linux distros do roughly the same thing anyway, so you just pick one that's fairly popular for the task at hand (desktop, server, multimedia, voip, embedded, whatever). If you don't like something about Linux, there's always BSD or OpenSolaris as well and all three of these are largely compatible and inter-operable with each other. In the proprietary OS world, there are really only two options: Windows and OS X. If you try out Windows and find that it doesn't suit your needs, it's not like you can return it to the store and buy some other company's version of Windows. Ditto for OS X.
I'll grant you that it would be nice if there were more of an effort on standardization here, but this is kinda like asking for world peace. Most of the mature open source software that ships on a Linux distribution has a long history, much of it pre-dating Linux. And one config format does not suit all purposes. In any event, the situation is even worse on platforms like Windows because there often is no way to script or automate configuration whereas on Linux, almost every app can be configured via a text file somewhere or at least via the command line.
Where I work, we've deployed thousands of Linux and Windows machines. Our process for deploying Linux on new machines is pretty straightforward: plug a box into the network and power it on. The installer boots automatically, installs a pre-defined set of packages, and detects and applies the configuration all with zero user intervention. For each Windows server we deploy, someone has to run the installer and then install and configure each package by hand, usually with several reboots involved. It's about 3 hours of pointing and clicking minimum.
Not mature anymore? How does something get un-mature? Which design flaws do you speak of? UNIX had its beginnings in the 1960's and I daresay there are few software designs that have lasted this long, and certainly no other operating systems. UNIX-like systems are still in use today precisely because they scale so well. UNIX is the single most flexible software framework in the world. These days you find it on mainframes, servers, desktops, routers, phones, video game consoles, e-book readers. It's what powers the massive cloud systems at Google, Amazon, and others thanks to the powerful virtualization options that Linux affords. The Internet was based on and continues to operate almost entirely on UNIX-like systems.
I'm not sure
Well, why not? The Twitter service, and anything you do with it, belongs to the people that own the service. They get to call the shots. Anyone who doesn't like it shouldn't use Twitter (or any other service owned by someone else), end of story.
(And before anyone draws the comparison, this argument wouldn't hold for an ISP because there's only one Internet and it is--or should be--a wholly public resource and remain strictly neutral in regards to the content passed around on any section of it.)
Fixed.
Steve Rambam, a private investigator, gives talks at the 2600 HOPE conferences. In 2006, he gave a talk called, "Privacy is Dead, Get Over It." He makes a convincing case that in the age of the Internet, 20 bucks will get you access to everything you ever wanted to know about someone. Not just pseudo-personal information like address, date of birth, SSN, phone numbers, and so on, but their complete financial history including credit records, bank accounts, loans, and major purchases; magazine subscriptions; utility bills; memberships in various organizations, clubs, and charities; travel itineraries, you name it. Private companies have been compiling information from public, commercial, and government sources over the last decade and have gotten astonishingly good at assembling a complete profile of practically every person in western society. And there's no way to opt out or tell them to stop it because it's all perfectly legal. (The CIA and FBI are their biggest customers.) He also notes that sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are a private investigator's wet dream because people (even criminals) literally put all of their interests, activities, photos, relationships, and thoughts right up there on the Internet for everyone to see. (Or subpoena.)
At the 2008 conference, he told the story about he and a journalist friend played a game of hide and seek. The journalist (I don't recall his name) said that he could disappear from Steve's radar and Steve said, "bring it on." I wish I could remember all of the details, but the gist is that the journalist, despite his very best efforts, he couldn't stay hidden. He used aliases and even opened up bank accounts in foreign countries. It's a terrific speech and you can hear it here.
Okay then, I will: The "Church" of Scientology is notorious for harassing critics into silence. People who have written unflattering papers, articles, or pieces on the Co$ have found their property repeatedly vandalized. They make calls to your employer (or customers), spread rumors both online and off, and interrogate your relatives while posing as federal officers.
There's a reason the Anonymous protests from a couple years ago were semi-effective: all of the protesters wore masks before, during, and after the protest to conceal their identities. The best the Co$ could do to counter this was write down the license plate numbers of the protesters where they could or goad the loudest protesters into taking off their masks. I can't find the link now, but I seem to recall that after these protests, the Co$ tried to get laws passed in many major cities prohibiting protesters from wearing masks.