Remember, the IETF doesn't really have any "official powers." Have you read the message that's linked to in this article? They're asking for comment on whether they should take a political stand. I'm assuming that if they have no feedback saying "Don't cave in!" and only feedback saying "Cave in!" they're going to follow popular opinion and cave in. If you don't like the idea of standardized eavesdropping, then by all means let them know and let me make the polite observation that a cogent and well-thought out argument will make a lot more impact that obscenity.
However, let me clearly state that I am in no way in favor of this kind of violation of privacies. I'm saying that if things come to the point that there is no other option but to develop some sort of "standards" for this crap, there should be at least an attempt to prevent them from being REQUIRED.
I guess I've just learned better than to expect that the world is all going to be sunshine and light. Governments don't care about their citizens anymore, and corporations don't care about their customers. Power and money are what talk. It's unlikely that a group of essentially volunteers are going to make significant headway against world governments and multinational corporations in basic human rights issues.
If you expect the rest of the world to play fair, may I politely inform you that you have some growing up to do. "Death before dishonor!" sounds nice on a tombstone, but in reality, discretion is often the better part of valor. If you can't stand up to them directly, maybe the next best step is to do what you can and live to fight another day.
You say, "If you want real security, use a non-standard algorithm (Skipjack or Rijndael are good for this) to encrypt the message."
I have to disagree with this statement. If you pay any attention to the crypto world, especially lately with the US gov't trying to find a new standard for encryption to replace DES and all its associated conversations, you should understand that the reason encryption algorithms become "popular" and "standard" is because they are subjected to brutal levels of scrutiny and analysis to determine their ability to withstand the various attacks to which you can subject crypto algorithms. The ones that stand up the best to this sort of hammering are the ones that tend to become widely used simply because they can stand up to the worst sorts of attacks the smartest people in crypto can come up with.
Saying "using a non-standard algorithm is more secure than a standard one" is just as bad as saying "security through obscurity works." It might, but then again it might not. The whole point is that you just don't know, while with the routines that have been publically anaylzed, you do know, at least to a reasonable measure.
And as far as what sort of computing power the Governments might have (The U.S. and Japan in particular since they seem to produce the largest number of the most powerful supercomputers), there's a lot of "scare" noise being thrown about that I personally don't put much faith in. Most of the crypto algorithms are such that it would take a dramatic mathematical breakthrough to really crack them rather than just more horsepower. If it's the difference between not cracking a code before the heat death of the universe and getting into it just after the sun collapses into a brown dwarf, i'm not going to worry.
If the IETF gets feedback indicating that they will have to figure out some way of implementing "digital wiretapping" with whatever existing/new standards, I highly urge everyone to recommend that they place them into the "MAY" or "OPTIONAL" categories of the specs.
That way, if a company wants to implement and sell a product that meets the standard in a way that fascistic governments who don't believe in personal freedoms will let them build and sell them, they can do so by implementing the "OPTIONAL" Backdoor parts of the spec.
Those groups who prefer security over letting Uncle Sam (or whichever hacker group out there is simply smart enough to read the specs and implement their own snooping software that follows the "RFC-'1984' - Government Backdoors into Network Protocols" spec) from eavesdropping, like the OpenBSD guys, can simply ignore the "OPTIONAL" part of the spec that outlines the backdoor without breaking the entire thing.
Sorry for the emotionally-loaded phrasing, but this kind of crap really gets me steamed. I'm amazed on a daily basis at how willing our governments are (especially here in the US) to simply trample our civil/constitutional rights for the Holy purpose of "National Security" whatever that means.
Navajo "code walkers" or "code talkers"? I've always heard the latter term.
Also, not really related, but I saw that "Nova" episode about Fermat's Last Theorem. All I can say about it was that it was incredibly fascinating, it was very well done to make clear what's obviously a very mathematical concept to someone without a lot of deep math background, and that hard-core mathematicians have absolutely no life whatsoever.
Next time your S.O. complains about you spending too much time in front of the keyboard, just get them to watch this show and see how those zany math-heads sit in their den/office doing not much more than doodling mathematic formulae on legal pads for as much as 18 hours a day, 7 days a week...
Microsoft already has the upper hand with this and I can forsee it becoming VERY popular. Think about this perfectly reasonable scenario:
Microsoft teams up with some of the bigger e-Commerce sites, Amazon.com, eBay, Reel.com, whomever, and says, "We'll give you a bunch of co-marketing dollars to start using Microsoft Passport." Of course, the sites go for it because they just want to make money.
"Everyone" is already using Microsoft Internet Explorer because it's part of Windows and "everyone uses Windows." Next time an MSIE user goes to one of those sites, a new AciveX component will download and they'll get a little message, "Try Microsoft Passport - we'll handle your billing for you! You'll never have to enter your billing information again!"
The average user isn't going to have any idea what's going on - they only know that they like Amazon.com's "One-Click Shopping" option and if they can get ALL websites to act like that, even better! Clickety-click and their data goes straight to Microsoft.
It's not about the security or technology -- it's all about how well you can market and making it easier for the sheep to follow the rest of the flock. Hence Microsoft's dominance.
I hate talking on the telephone. While I'm on the phone, I can't do very much. Even with a cordless phone, I've still got one half of my total number of hands dedicated to doing nothing but holding the phone up by my head. Rather irritating, IMHO.
I just bought myself a $100 hands-free cordless phone by GE. It's got a little headset like you see The Friendly Time-Life Operators using on those TV commercials, and a little "brick" with a phonepad and a battery in it that you clip to your waistband/belt and a cord that runs between the two. I thought when I bought it that it would be a novelty at best, but, because I am now able to do other things while I'm on the phone, like water my plants, feed the fish, vaccuum the living room, wash dishes, or whatever, it really makes a tremendous difference for me; when I have to sit in a chair and hold the phone against the side of my head, I get bored/antsy quickly and just want to hang up so I can do something with my hands.
I don't specifically want "wearable" computing, but I would love to have hands-free computing. If I could be in the back yard watering the plants, or taking care of my fish, or playing with my boa constrictor, or doing just about anything else "interesting" while I'm having to fire off half a dozen boring-but-job-related replies to half a dozen boring-but-job-related EMails, the people who communicate with me would probably get a lot more communication from me.
It would be nice if I could use this same equipment while I was at the mall to see if I could find a better price online for this nice DVD I'm looking at, or bring it with me to the grocery store so I can review my shopping list (or keep it with me when I'm not at the grocery store, so I can add to my shopping list when I think of something, instead of when I'm near my shopping list), that would be even better. But for me, the hands-free operation is more desirable.
And I don't mean something like the Palm Pilot. I find it's data input "capabilities" (i.e. Graffiti [sp?] and the fact that input has to happen effectively one letter at a time in that little square) extremely irritating at best and nearly useless in general.
Ideally I would like voice recognition, but barring that, some sort of very durable keyboard is the next best solution. I think most geeks can probably type a lot faster than they can write. I want something specifically designed for hands-free or nearly-hands-off operation - I don't want to have to hold it in one hand and type with the other to be able to use it, which also disqualifies all those wince boxes out there.
It has to have the same conveniences as my new phone -- I have to be able to make use of it while being mobile and having both hands free. Even if I have to use one hand to type to respond to EMail, it needs to be mostly hands-off.
Umm, you obviously don't pay any attention to Mozilla development.
Mozilla/Netscape 5 is a complete rewrite pretty much from the ground up. If you can explain how "complete rewrite == bug fix" I might accept your statements.
There you go again, getting personal. As if you have any idea what my job is about or that I would ever have any reason to thank you for any sort of advice you could ever consider giving me.
Anyone remember quite a few years ago when Justin Hall tried to register fuck.com and Internic came right out and told him he couldn't? Anyone remember Justin Hall at all? Wonder where he's at and what he'd think of this since, at least historically speaking, he's got about the best claim on at least that one domain name.
Someone tell the guys over at mozilla.org they can stop working and go home now....
I'm about as sick of these "Mozilla is a failure", "Netscape is dead" stories as I am of hearing Larry Ellison spouting off about once every six months for the last six or seven years, "The PC is dead. Network computing is the future!"
As long as people continue to use it and work on it, it won't die.
Besides, the reason it's taking so long is because it's a quantum leap over what Netscape 4.x is. Not just adding a few more fancy buttons on the same-old same-old as Netscape and MSIE have been since their versions 1.x.
I am personally very happy using and will continue to use Mozilla.
How different is this really from most journalism today - where most "grown ups" get their daily information?
If someone wants to write an article, they can either get their for-pay login to Lexix-Nexus and suck down a couple of pre-written articles to regurgitate as an uninspired rehash of data found elsewhere.
Or they can hop on the web for free (minus ISP connect charges etc.) and check out Slashdot, ZDNet, C|Net, PCweek, EETimes, Salon, or any of ther other "bigger" online 'zines to get pre-written articles to regurgitate as an uninspired rehash of data found elsewhere.
The people read them anyway, probably because they've been educated in the kind of environment where they've learned that the best kind of learning is to suck some data from another source or two and regurgitate it for the teacher in an uninspired essay of rehashed material.
The few percent of people who don't go for that kind of stuff are going to enjoy doing the research and the writing, or at least learn something from it on their own, despite any bad grades they might receive from a "grading machine" and either learn to regurgitate uninspired essays until they get out of school and do something they enjoy, or just drop out and use their stunning intellects to RULE THE WORLD!! (Err, sorry. I'm getting carried away. But you get the idea.)
As a big fan of Karl Sims wacky little wiggly things, I'd love to get a link to the work the Brandeis guys are doing on making physical versions. Anyone have any idea?
There will have to be a fully-equipped camera and sound crew, along with whatever support on the island. Let's say something "bad" happens to one of the "survivors." Do you really think the other people on the island are going to sit back and say, "Oh, we're the camera crew, we're not allowed to treat you for snakebite. You're gonna die." The support crew affects the behaviours of the "survivors" by creating an environment of "Well, nothing bad could *really* happen to me because there's all these other people here in case something does." Even assuming the whole situation is even vaguely real to begin with.
Since I'm not trying to construct a proof, I don't see how you can find a "logical error" in my argument. It's a supposition based on my knowledge of human ethical behaviour.
Try to not resort to personal insults next time you don't think things through, as well. You just come across sounding like a loser and a jerk.
Like we're supposed to believe this is really going to be a challenge for the quote-unquote survivors when there's a whole freakin' camera and sound crew living on the island with them? Yeah right.
Oh wait, or do you have to volunteer to build your camera and sound equipment out of coconuts and bamboo and palm leaves and be willing to eat sand and seashells before you're part of the crew for the show?
What tripe. What trash. But people will watch because 85% of the people in the U.S. are blithering idiots who need to get their entertainment spoon-fed by whomever has the loudest marketing. Critical thinking abilities in this country have dropped to critical levels when the networks can pass this sort of stuff off a "real". I might even say this is more insulting to one's intelligence than that "Erkle" show.
Care to share where you got your SPARCBook3 for $230, shipping included, and maybe some hardware specs? For that price, it might be worth taking a screwdriver/hacksaw/hammer to it and see if I couldn't hack up some semblance of a wearable machine that could run A Real OS.
NewtonOS: generally overlooked by everyone except Newton owners. Designed for handheld and portable devices while retaining a high degree of functionality. Handwriting recognition actually works as expected on later revisions without having to resort to gestural alphabets. Generally considered very advanced and capable, even when compared with other more popular palmtop/handlheld/portable operating systems and considered the "Grandfather" of most of those popular operating systems who owe much of their basic design to NewtonOS. Has a small but dedicated core of fans and followers who want to beat Steve Jobs with a whiffle bat until he bleeds from his ears for discontinuing the project that originally birthed it.
The world's ecosystem is collapsing under the strain of trying to support 12 billion human beings. New agricultural and animal husbandry techniques are struggling to keep up in the face of strange new diseases and syndromes caused by the amount of genetic engineering having been introduced into the food species and the low tolerance for new diseases because of the amount of domestication away from the original robust strains of food animals and plants.
The last acres of rainforest are slash-and-burned. Potential cures for many chronic diseases are lost forever, along with 25% of land species diversity.
Ocean life is struggling to maintain a balance from massive overfishing and problems caused by pollution. Most cetacean species have died off from over-harvesting of the plankton and krill beds they normally feed from. Species diversity is only 10% of what it was in the late 20th century in the oceans.
Only the most remote locations like the steppes of Tibet and Mongolia and the Australian outback maintain anything like a historical ecology, however introduced species and environmental changes have started to affect even the life in these remote areas.
Strange new viral, bacterial and prion-caused diseases start to appear from the high concentration of humans in close proximity to chemical and biological wastes.
"Chernobyl-class" nuclear disasters become more prevalent as the maintenaince on nuclear facilities drops and new plants are brought online with speed in favor of safety simply to handle the huge demand for new energy sources as oil and petroleum reserves drop to critical levels around the world.
Overall, human standards of living drop across the board as the division between "rich" and "poor" become broader. Middle Eastern oil wealth has dried up as so has the oil. Only the Software Tycoons who got their start in the late 20th/early 21st century maintain extremely high standards of living; the world is still very dependent on computers.
California and Washington states have seceded from the United States, forming a new Technological Monarchy run by the major software/hardware corporations in which 99.99% of the computing and software power of the world now resides. The rise of the Software States began in the late 20th century with the passing of the UCITA as law, granting the Software States the legal rights to remotely enter any corporation or government computer systems to disable their software. It was only a small jump from UCITA to complete governmental independence.
A small underground of hackers and activists continue to struggle against overwhelming odds to help maintain the collapsing world ecosystems, rebbuild and maintain governments and understand and fight the strange new diseases. The core tenets of what used to be called "The Open Source Movement" has since mutated into a world-wide coalition of scientists - traditionally educated and dedicated hobbiest alike - of all branches who struggle with shoestring-and-chewing-gum materials to perfect new techniques for keeping the people and the planet functioning. Their "reward" has passed from popular recognition of their technical and scientific abilities into a simpler humanitarian desire to Do The Right Thing.
Yeah, so my forecast for the future is dim; I have a low opinion of humanity, I guess.
On the bright side I can predict that around the same time, hate mail to Jon Katz drops off as he dies after a long and moderately successful career as a technology journalist...
IBM controlled the majority of the hardware market, not the software that made the hardware work. Microsoft, even at the time IBM was "The Bad Guys" did a lot of the software. The reason IBM succumbed to market forces is because other people came along and made hardware that did the same thing, better, faster and cheaper and IBM lost their fight to control the hardware platform.
Nobody can come along and do the same thing as Microsoft but better, faster and cheaper because they control their APIs and can change them on a whim to make sure that even if someone does try to come out with a Win32-compatible OS on the market, it will break against all of their apps with the next revision which they would certainly quickly release. Assuming they don't just outright sue the crap out of whomever is trying to market that clone OS on "look and feel" or some kind of patent or copyright issues.
The reason that Microsoft can retain this control is because of their de-facto monopoly. They have marketed themselves into position that if you're NOT Win32-compatible, you can't compete. Linux isn't truly a competitor with Microsoft since it's not a "Win32 capable operating system." NOBODY competes with Microsoft in their market.
In this "IBM Bad Guys" world, where we had IBM and Apple as the hardware vendors being the rough equivalent of Microsoft and Linux as operating systems today, don't think of Linux as an IBM clone that works better, cheaper and faster, think of Linux as the "Apple"-equivalent of operating systems - it's a completely different beast. Imagine that, in the "IBM Bad Guys" scenario, instead of being able to buy an IBM-clone, you had to migrate your entire business over to Apple to get away from IBM. You might do it if IBM screwed you over big enough, but the break-even point is very high, even if you're really sick of IBM screwing you. It gets worse if IBM keeps an eye on things to make sure that sticking with IBM is just barely less painful than switching.
IBM lost the hardware wars while Apple won their fight for keeping control of their hardware platform. Now, a good 15 years later, look at the state of the IBM-clone industry versus the state of the Apple-clone industry and tell me which one is more energetic and vital. Now, replace "Apple" with "Microsoft" in this scenario and you see what people fear from a Microsoft-dominated computer industry.
Breaking up Microsoft wouldn't accomplish anything.
I think the best thing that could happen to Microsoft (or worst, depending on point-of-view) is to force them to publish complete API specs for all their products, including things like document formats, and then audit them on a regular basis to ensure (insure?) that their own products are following their published APIs correctly. Further, prevent them from trying to sue anyone who develops products that implement their APIs.
This would allow for truly fair competition while not interfering with their place in "a free and open market." If Microsoft can truly "Innovate" then they will remain on top in the software industry. If it turns out they are merely leveraging OS monopoly and a faster, sleeker company comes along and pulls the rug out from under them, oh well, I guess they weren't all that innovative after all.
I leave it as an excercise to the reader as to how to solve the technical problems of auditing Microsoft to make sure their products really do follow their own published APIs....
Heh. I wonder who's decision it was to put "A Bug's Life" by also-Jobs-run Pixar on the top of the stack of DVDs on that page. Was it someone trying to suck up to the Steve or did the Steve himself make it known that he would like it that way?
We actually had some of those cards around. We tried one in one of the Ultra 5's. The system never "saw" it. We bought the Sun-authorized SCSI card from Sun with Sun-authorized firmware, it worked fine.
As with everything in the computer world, Your Mileage May Vary.
Slashdot Mirror
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However, let me clearly state that I am in no way in favor of this kind of violation of privacies. I'm saying that if things come to the point that there is no other option but to develop some sort of "standards" for this crap, there should be at least an attempt to prevent them from being REQUIRED.
I guess I've just learned better than to expect that the world is all going to be sunshine and light. Governments don't care about their citizens anymore, and corporations don't care about their customers. Power and money are what talk. It's unlikely that a group of essentially volunteers are going to make significant headway against world governments and multinational corporations in basic human rights issues.
If you expect the rest of the world to play fair, may I politely inform you that you have some growing up to do. "Death before dishonor!" sounds nice on a tombstone, but in reality, discretion is often the better part of valor. If you can't stand up to them directly, maybe the next best step is to do what you can and live to fight another day.
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I have to disagree with this statement. If you pay any attention to the crypto world, especially lately with the US gov't trying to find a new standard for encryption to replace DES and all its associated conversations, you should understand that the reason encryption algorithms become "popular" and "standard" is because they are subjected to brutal levels of scrutiny and analysis to determine their ability to withstand the various attacks to which you can subject crypto algorithms. The ones that stand up the best to this sort of hammering are the ones that tend to become widely used simply because they can stand up to the worst sorts of attacks the smartest people in crypto can come up with.
Saying "using a non-standard algorithm is more secure than a standard one" is just as bad as saying "security through obscurity works." It might, but then again it might not. The whole point is that you just don't know, while with the routines that have been publically anaylzed, you do know, at least to a reasonable measure.
And as far as what sort of computing power the Governments might have (The U.S. and Japan in particular since they seem to produce the largest number of the most powerful supercomputers), there's a lot of "scare" noise being thrown about that I personally don't put much faith in. Most of the crypto algorithms are such that it would take a dramatic mathematical breakthrough to really crack them rather than just more horsepower. If it's the difference between not cracking a code before the heat death of the universe and getting into it just after the sun collapses into a brown dwarf, i'm not going to worry.
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That way, if a company wants to implement and sell a product that meets the standard in a way that fascistic governments who don't believe in personal freedoms will let them build and sell them, they can do so by implementing the "OPTIONAL" Backdoor parts of the spec.
Those groups who prefer security over letting Uncle Sam (or whichever hacker group out there is simply smart enough to read the specs and implement their own snooping software that follows the "RFC-'1984' - Government Backdoors into Network Protocols" spec) from eavesdropping, like the OpenBSD guys, can simply ignore the "OPTIONAL" part of the spec that outlines the backdoor without breaking the entire thing.
Sorry for the emotionally-loaded phrasing, but this kind of crap really gets me steamed. I'm amazed on a daily basis at how willing our governments are (especially here in the US) to simply trample our civil/constitutional rights for the Holy purpose of "National Security" whatever that means.
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Also, not really related, but I saw that "Nova" episode about Fermat's Last Theorem. All I can say about it was that it was incredibly fascinating, it was very well done to make clear what's obviously a very mathematical concept to someone without a lot of deep math background, and that hard-core mathematicians have absolutely no life whatsoever.
Next time your S.O. complains about you spending too much time in front of the keyboard, just get them to watch this show and see how those zany math-heads sit in their den/office doing not much more than doodling mathematic formulae on legal pads for as much as 18 hours a day, 7 days a week...
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Microsoft teams up with some of the bigger e-Commerce sites, Amazon.com, eBay, Reel.com, whomever, and says, "We'll give you a bunch of co-marketing dollars to start using Microsoft Passport." Of course, the sites go for it because they just want to make money.
"Everyone" is already using Microsoft Internet Explorer because it's part of Windows and "everyone uses Windows." Next time an MSIE user goes to one of those sites, a new AciveX component will download and they'll get a little message, "Try Microsoft Passport - we'll handle your billing for you! You'll never have to enter your billing information again!"
The average user isn't going to have any idea what's going on - they only know that they like Amazon.com's "One-Click Shopping" option and if they can get ALL websites to act like that, even better! Clickety-click and their data goes straight to Microsoft.
It's not about the security or technology -- it's all about how well you can market and making it easier for the sheep to follow the rest of the flock. Hence Microsoft's dominance.
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I just bought myself a $100 hands-free cordless phone by GE. It's got a little headset like you see The Friendly Time-Life Operators using on those TV commercials, and a little "brick" with a phonepad and a battery in it that you clip to your waistband/belt and a cord that runs between the two. I thought when I bought it that it would be a novelty at best, but, because I am now able to do other things while I'm on the phone, like water my plants, feed the fish, vaccuum the living room, wash dishes, or whatever, it really makes a tremendous difference for me; when I have to sit in a chair and hold the phone against the side of my head, I get bored/antsy quickly and just want to hang up so I can do something with my hands.
I don't specifically want "wearable" computing, but I would love to have hands-free computing. If I could be in the back yard watering the plants, or taking care of my fish, or playing with my boa constrictor, or doing just about anything else "interesting" while I'm having to fire off half a dozen boring-but-job-related replies to half a dozen boring-but-job-related EMails, the people who communicate with me would probably get a lot more communication from me.
It would be nice if I could use this same equipment while I was at the mall to see if I could find a better price online for this nice DVD I'm looking at, or bring it with me to the grocery store so I can review my shopping list (or keep it with me when I'm not at the grocery store, so I can add to my shopping list when I think of something, instead of when I'm near my shopping list), that would be even better. But for me, the hands-free operation is more desirable.
And I don't mean something like the Palm Pilot. I find it's data input "capabilities" (i.e. Graffiti [sp?] and the fact that input has to happen effectively one letter at a time in that little square) extremely irritating at best and nearly useless in general.
Ideally I would like voice recognition, but barring that, some sort of very durable keyboard is the next best solution. I think most geeks can probably type a lot faster than they can write. I want something specifically designed for hands-free or nearly-hands-off operation - I don't want to have to hold it in one hand and type with the other to be able to use it, which also disqualifies all those wince boxes out there.
It has to have the same conveniences as my new phone -- I have to be able to make use of it while being mobile and having both hands free. Even if I have to use one hand to type to respond to EMail, it needs to be mostly hands-off.
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Mozilla/Netscape 5 is a complete rewrite pretty much from the ground up. If you can explain how "complete rewrite == bug fix" I might accept your statements.
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I now forget this thread exists.
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I'm about as sick of these "Mozilla is a failure", "Netscape is dead" stories as I am of hearing Larry Ellison spouting off about once every six months for the last six or seven years, "The PC is dead. Network computing is the future!"
As long as people continue to use it and work on it, it won't die.
Besides, the reason it's taking so long is because it's a quantum leap over what Netscape 4.x is. Not just adding a few more fancy buttons on the same-old same-old as Netscape and MSIE have been since their versions 1.x.
I am personally very happy using and will continue to use Mozilla.
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If someone wants to write an article, they can either get their for-pay login to Lexix-Nexus and suck down a couple of pre-written articles to regurgitate as an uninspired rehash of data found elsewhere.
Or they can hop on the web for free (minus ISP connect charges etc.) and check out Slashdot, ZDNet, C|Net, PCweek, EETimes, Salon, or any of ther other "bigger" online 'zines to get pre-written articles to regurgitate as an uninspired rehash of data found elsewhere.
The people read them anyway, probably because they've been educated in the kind of environment where they've learned that the best kind of learning is to suck some data from another source or two and regurgitate it for the teacher in an uninspired essay of rehashed material.
The few percent of people who don't go for that kind of stuff are going to enjoy doing the research and the writing, or at least learn something from it on their own, despite any bad grades they might receive from a "grading machine" and either learn to regurgitate uninspired essays until they get out of school and do something they enjoy, or just drop out and use their stunning intellects to RULE THE WORLD!! (Err, sorry. I'm getting carried away. But you get the idea.)
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Why don't *you* think about what *you* said.
There will have to be a fully-equipped camera and sound crew, along with whatever support on the island. Let's say something "bad" happens to one of the "survivors." Do you really think the other people on the island are going to sit back and say, "Oh, we're the camera crew, we're not allowed to treat you for snakebite. You're gonna die." The support crew affects the behaviours of the "survivors" by creating an environment of "Well, nothing bad could *really* happen to me because there's all these other people here in case something does." Even assuming the whole situation is even vaguely real to begin with.
Since I'm not trying to construct a proof, I don't see how you can find a "logical error" in my argument. It's a supposition based on my knowledge of human ethical behaviour.
Try to not resort to personal insults next time you don't think things through, as well. You just come across sounding like a loser and a jerk.
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Oh wait, or do you have to volunteer to build your camera and sound equipment out of coconuts and bamboo and palm leaves and be willing to eat sand and seashells before you're part of the crew for the show?
What tripe. What trash. But people will watch because 85% of the people in the U.S. are blithering idiots who need to get their entertainment spoon-fed by whomever has the loudest marketing. Critical thinking abilities in this country have dropped to critical levels when the networks can pass this sort of stuff off a "real". I might even say this is more insulting to one's intelligence than that "Erkle" show.
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That way anyone who has any beefs with him can take them up directly.
I'm sure it would turn out interesting if nothing else as he's certainly an interesting writer and person, even if you think he's something of a dolt.
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(It's a joke!! It's a joke!!)
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The world's ecosystem is collapsing under the strain of trying to support 12 billion human beings. New agricultural and animal husbandry techniques are struggling to keep up in the face of strange new diseases and syndromes caused by the amount of genetic engineering having been introduced into the food species and the low tolerance for new diseases because of the amount of domestication away from the original robust strains of food animals and plants.
The last acres of rainforest are slash-and-burned. Potential cures for many chronic diseases are lost forever, along with 25% of land species diversity.
Ocean life is struggling to maintain a balance from massive overfishing and problems caused by pollution. Most cetacean species have died off from over-harvesting of the plankton and krill beds they normally feed from. Species diversity is only 10% of what it was in the late 20th century in the oceans.
Only the most remote locations like the steppes of Tibet and Mongolia and the Australian outback maintain anything like a historical ecology, however introduced species and environmental changes have started to affect even the life in these remote areas.
Strange new viral, bacterial and prion-caused diseases start to appear from the high concentration of humans in close proximity to chemical and biological wastes.
"Chernobyl-class" nuclear disasters become more prevalent as the maintenaince on nuclear facilities drops and new plants are brought online with speed in favor of safety simply to handle the huge demand for new energy sources as oil and petroleum reserves drop to critical levels around the world.
Overall, human standards of living drop across the board as the division between "rich" and "poor" become broader. Middle Eastern oil wealth has dried up as so has the oil. Only the Software Tycoons who got their start in the late 20th/early 21st century maintain extremely high standards of living; the world is still very dependent on computers.
California and Washington states have seceded from the United States, forming a new Technological Monarchy run by the major software/hardware corporations in which 99.99% of the computing and software power of the world now resides. The rise of the Software States began in the late 20th century with the passing of the UCITA as law, granting the Software States the legal rights to remotely enter any corporation or government computer systems to disable their software. It was only a small jump from UCITA to complete governmental independence.
A small underground of hackers and activists continue to struggle against overwhelming odds to help maintain the collapsing world ecosystems, rebbuild and maintain governments and understand and fight the strange new diseases. The core tenets of what used to be called "The Open Source Movement" has since mutated into a world-wide coalition of scientists - traditionally educated and dedicated hobbiest alike - of all branches who struggle with shoestring-and-chewing-gum materials to perfect new techniques for keeping the people and the planet functioning. Their "reward" has passed from popular recognition of their technical and scientific abilities into a simpler humanitarian desire to Do The Right Thing.
Yeah, so my forecast for the future is dim; I have a low opinion of humanity, I guess.
On the bright side I can predict that around the same time, hate mail to Jon Katz drops off as he dies after a long and moderately successful career as a technology journalist...
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Nobody can come along and do the same thing as Microsoft but better, faster and cheaper because they control their APIs and can change them on a whim to make sure that even if someone does try to come out with a Win32-compatible OS on the market, it will break against all of their apps with the next revision which they would certainly quickly release. Assuming they don't just outright sue the crap out of whomever is trying to market that clone OS on "look and feel" or some kind of patent or copyright issues.
The reason that Microsoft can retain this control is because of their de-facto monopoly. They have marketed themselves into position that if you're NOT Win32-compatible, you can't compete. Linux isn't truly a competitor with Microsoft since it's not a "Win32 capable operating system." NOBODY competes with Microsoft in their market.
In this "IBM Bad Guys" world, where we had IBM and Apple as the hardware vendors being the rough equivalent of Microsoft and Linux as operating systems today, don't think of Linux as an IBM clone that works better, cheaper and faster, think of Linux as the "Apple"-equivalent of operating systems - it's a completely different beast. Imagine that, in the "IBM Bad Guys" scenario, instead of being able to buy an IBM-clone, you had to migrate your entire business over to Apple to get away from IBM. You might do it if IBM screwed you over big enough, but the break-even point is very high, even if you're really sick of IBM screwing you. It gets worse if IBM keeps an eye on things to make sure that sticking with IBM is just barely less painful than switching.
IBM lost the hardware wars while Apple won their fight for keeping control of their hardware platform. Now, a good 15 years later, look at the state of the IBM-clone industry versus the state of the Apple-clone industry and tell me which one is more energetic and vital. Now, replace "Apple" with "Microsoft" in this scenario and you see what people fear from a Microsoft-dominated computer industry.
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I think the best thing that could happen to Microsoft (or worst, depending on point-of-view) is to force them to publish complete API specs for all their products, including things like document formats, and then audit them on a regular basis to ensure (insure?) that their own products are following their published APIs correctly. Further, prevent them from trying to sue anyone who develops products that implement their APIs.
This would allow for truly fair competition while not interfering with their place in "a free and open market." If Microsoft can truly "Innovate" then they will remain on top in the software industry. If it turns out they are merely leveraging OS monopoly and a faster, sleeker company comes along and pulls the rug out from under them, oh well, I guess they weren't all that innovative after all.
I leave it as an excercise to the reader as to how to solve the technical problems of auditing Microsoft to make sure their products really do follow their own published APIs....
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Even so, Mom always DID like you better...
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As with everything in the computer world, Your Mileage May Vary.
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