Even if the marketing droids don't know how to innovate, its not up to us to figure it out for them. The Web is alive and well without them (unlike radio, or television, which required marketing to bring programming to the masses).
Given the nature of HTML, I think comparing text size modification with ad-blocking is little more than a straw man.
Okay, how about if I tear out the ads from my copy of Time or my local paper? If those publishers cannot stop me from blocking (by physically removing) their ads, why should Web publishers be treated any differently?
Even if computers are not able to operationalize the source code on their own in the future, I'm assuming that there will still be people who will be able to write compilers, interpreters, viewers, or whatnot in order to operationalize the bytestreams that we leave behind. The main issue will be specifications, of course, and that's where open standards come in. By spreading the specifications far and wide, rather than encumbering them with patents, copyrights, or treating them as trade secrets, we allow interested people in the future to effectively decode the vast amount of data that we're leaving behind.
The main issue with the NASA data isn't that the data is unavailable. As you point out, its fairly easy to pull data off a magnetic tape, once you have the right equipment. Its that the specifications that describe how that data is to be interpreted have been lost. If the specifications were available, we could have written a converter to turn that data into a more modern format that's easier operationalize. What I'm saying is that, with many programming languages (especially "open" ones like C, or Python), the core specification is widely available, and it is unlikely in the extreme for all copies of said specification to disappear spontaneously. Therefore, if someone in the future has the motivation, they can write their own interpreter to turn our source code into whatever sort of binaries they want.
I also have my doubts about representing hierarchical file/storage/inode systems being around efficiently for that long, which may be troublesome if the tarball wants to unroll directories of #includes onto some many-dimensional relational eigenspace (or however our datacubes will be organised).
Again, the comment I made about open systems above applies. Open systems (or, more precisely, open specifications) allow whomever has the will and the time to write a program that will translate our inode based file into whatever multi-dimensional system they have in the future.
The examples you're relating aren't germane. In all of the cases, the data isn't plain text. It's binary data that's been encoded to fit on the media. Moreover, the range of values represented by the data is large - moon dust readings, images, etc. Finally, for all the above data the sample size is small - there are only a few sets of moon dust data, the only Jacquard looms available are all museum pieces, etc, and the encodings are proprietary.
On the other hand, plain text is a fairly small alphabet, encoded in an open-source format. Even in the (extremely unlikely) case that the format description for ASCII or Unicode is lost, one can do lexical analysis on the data to reconstruct the format.
(Contemplate what happens when current source code formats become incompatible...)
As I understand it, source code is either ASCII or Unicode plain text. Are you really saying that, even a hundred years from now, our computers won't be able to understand plain text?
Having applications hosted over the network makes things subjectively different, however. If I have local copies of my application, I'll be able to work locally with whatever data I have while I wait for the Internet connection to be restored.
If the application is hosted on the Internet, however, all work stops when the 'net connection goes down. The option of working locally for a while isn't there.
A large portion of the water delivered to ISS comes from the Space Shuttle as it combusts liquid hydrogen to power itself while docked.
Really? I was under the impression that the ISS got its water along with its food and other consumables as part of the supplies that are delivered by both the Shuttle and the Progress spacecraft. Indeed, I was watching a documentary on the ISS, and they showed Shuttle astronauts unpacking large bags of water as part of a supply run to the ISS.
For the draft to have had an impact on the gene pool, a vast majority of the people who went to war would either have had to be killed or mutilated in a way that rendered them unable to reproduce. Even in the American Civil War, that was not the case.
Can you find me even one example of a war that actually affected the reproductive ability of all of the soldiers that fought in it?
Also, lets not forget that the draft only affects men. Women were excluded, and therefore any gene not on the Y chromosome would have been excluded from being affected.
A government too weak to pass any laws but those that are blindingly, obviously necessary is my kind of government.
That's not what you get, though. What you get is either a government that's even more dominated by corporate interests than the one we have here (e.g. Italy), or one that's so weak it can't pass any laws, including the ones that are "necessary" and "blindingly obvious" (e.g. India).
Well, that ignores that the effect of this regulation is to cancel out the effect of other regulation (i.e. the DMCA) so that the total effect of the regulation is increased freedom, not decreased freedom.
A two-party system theoretically forces moderate views and compromise instead of ending up with multiple warring parties sharing power.
Well, either that or you get two parties that are equally extreme but on opposite ends of the spectrum. Moderates then have to go with the party they find least distasteful at the moment.
The main advantage, in my humble opinion, of a two party system is government stability. The parties in a multi-party parliamentary system may better represent the views of their constituents. However, the large numbers of parties ensures that governments, when they are formed, consist of large, weak coalitions that are often unable to accomplish anything for fear of causing an allied party to go into opposition.
Indeed, if Washington had not chosen to run, political parties would have formed much sooner, for no one else had the broad base of support he did, and therefore they would have had to organize their supporters (in other words, create a political party).
As a sibling AC has said, the choice is not always the consumer's.
As an example, when my parents moved to this country, they did not want to get a credit card. They (quite rightly) saw that it was all too easy to fall into a cycle of debt that would be nigh impossible to escape. Yet, because they were recent immigrants and had no other credit history, they were constantly running into trouble getting services (like car rentals, apartment leases, etc.) without having a credit card. Eventually they did get a credit card and put a few small charges on it so that they could have something on their credit record.
The fallacy is in supposing that "unrelated" goods are, in fact, unrelated. In an ideal free market, one would not require a credit check to rent a car. But, the real world is not an ideal free market, and that's where libertarian thought runs into problems as it tries to apply pure lassiez-faire solutions to markets that are in fact quite far removed from the capitalistic ideal.
If they take money from your credit card without you authorizing it, you can contact your credit card company and request a charge back. If you already have a payment plan, however, you have essentially pre-authorized payments, which makes getting the money back much more difficult.
That's one thing I find somewhat hypocritical of many libertarian thinkers. Its not okay when the government infringes on your privacy, but its perfectly okay when some corporation does so.
Why move to Europe? I mean, its not like they'll not be restricting the system so that it only works over Europe. Why not just buy a Galileo receiver (when they become available)?
Also, isn't Galileo supposed to be backwards compatible with GPS?
I don't know. There's a pretty strong xenophobic bent in France and Germany (quite understandable, given that the "native" population is undergoing negative growth). So, given that, the French populace might be willing to accept someone who says that they're going to "preserve French culture", and view this sort of thing as collateral damage inflicted in the course of a greater good.
Second, you can't ignore the power of selective enforcement when it comes to these kinds of things. I mean, who's to say that the average Frenchman/Frenchwoman won't feel the effect of this legislation, while an immigrant to France will have to face all sorts of rigmarole to get their Internet service reconnected after they've been accused of illegal file sharing for the nth time. All the while, the police agencies are going to trumpet the fact that the immigrants are stealing French content and depriving hardworking French writers and artists of their due.
As I allude to in the title of this post, France already has had one neo-conservative president (Sarkozy), and the French public is fully capable of electing another.
The OS is presumed to be Windows unless the article mentions otherwise; Linux and Mac botnets are sufficiently rare that discovery of one still provokes comment, whereas Windows botnets are common enough to talk about without having to specifically mention that they're on Windows.
To be fair, though, that's the major attack vector for Windows users too. There aren't a whole lot of zero-day attacks out there for Windows; most worms, trojans, etc. propagate via users who haven't bothered to patch their machines.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that the Linux userbase is still more security conscious than the Windows userbase.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the marketing droids don't know how to innovate, its not up to us to figure it out for them. The Web is alive and well without them (unlike radio, or television, which required marketing to bring programming to the masses).
Given the nature of HTML, I think comparing text size modification with ad-blocking is little more than a straw man.
Okay, how about if I tear out the ads from my copy of Time or my local paper? If those publishers cannot stop me from blocking (by physically removing) their ads, why should Web publishers be treated any differently?
The next one is even better: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/1/31/
Even if computers are not able to operationalize the source code on their own in the future, I'm assuming that there will still be people who will be able to write compilers, interpreters, viewers, or whatnot in order to operationalize the bytestreams that we leave behind. The main issue will be specifications, of course, and that's where open standards come in. By spreading the specifications far and wide, rather than encumbering them with patents, copyrights, or treating them as trade secrets, we allow interested people in the future to effectively decode the vast amount of data that we're leaving behind.
The main issue with the NASA data isn't that the data is unavailable. As you point out, its fairly easy to pull data off a magnetic tape, once you have the right equipment. Its that the specifications that describe how that data is to be interpreted have been lost. If the specifications were available, we could have written a converter to turn that data into a more modern format that's easier operationalize. What I'm saying is that, with many programming languages (especially "open" ones like C, or Python), the core specification is widely available, and it is unlikely in the extreme for all copies of said specification to disappear spontaneously. Therefore, if someone in the future has the motivation, they can write their own interpreter to turn our source code into whatever sort of binaries they want.
I also have my doubts about representing hierarchical file/storage/inode systems being around efficiently for that long, which may be troublesome if the tarball wants to unroll directories of #includes onto some many-dimensional relational eigenspace (or however our datacubes will be organised).
Again, the comment I made about open systems above applies. Open systems (or, more precisely, open specifications) allow whomever has the will and the time to write a program that will translate our inode based file into whatever multi-dimensional system they have in the future.
The examples you're relating aren't germane. In all of the cases, the data isn't plain text. It's binary data that's been encoded to fit on the media. Moreover, the range of values represented by the data is large - moon dust readings, images, etc. Finally, for all the above data the sample size is small - there are only a few sets of moon dust data, the only Jacquard looms available are all museum pieces, etc, and the encodings are proprietary.
On the other hand, plain text is a fairly small alphabet, encoded in an open-source format. Even in the (extremely unlikely) case that the format description for ASCII or Unicode is lost, one can do lexical analysis on the data to reconstruct the format.
(Contemplate what happens when current source code formats become incompatible...)
As I understand it, source code is either ASCII or Unicode plain text. Are you really saying that, even a hundred years from now, our computers won't be able to understand plain text?
Having applications hosted over the network makes things subjectively different, however. If I have local copies of my application, I'll be able to work locally with whatever data I have while I wait for the Internet connection to be restored.
If the application is hosted on the Internet, however, all work stops when the 'net connection goes down. The option of working locally for a while isn't there.
Doesn't Google App Engine give you something like that?
Unfortunately, the number of cases where "all else is equal" is vanishingly small.
A large portion of the water delivered to ISS comes from the Space Shuttle as it combusts liquid hydrogen to power itself while docked.
Really? I was under the impression that the ISS got its water along with its food and other consumables as part of the supplies that are delivered by both the Shuttle and the Progress spacecraft. Indeed, I was watching a documentary on the ISS, and they showed Shuttle astronauts unpacking large bags of water as part of a supply run to the ISS.
For the draft to have had an impact on the gene pool, a vast majority of the people who went to war would either have had to be killed or mutilated in a way that rendered them unable to reproduce. Even in the American Civil War, that was not the case.
Can you find me even one example of a war that actually affected the reproductive ability of all of the soldiers that fought in it?
Also, lets not forget that the draft only affects men. Women were excluded, and therefore any gene not on the Y chromosome would have been excluded from being affected.
A government too weak to pass any laws but those that are blindingly, obviously necessary is my kind of government.
That's not what you get, though. What you get is either a government that's even more dominated by corporate interests than the one we have here (e.g. Italy), or one that's so weak it can't pass any laws, including the ones that are "necessary" and "blindingly obvious" (e.g. India).
Well, that ignores that the effect of this regulation is to cancel out the effect of other regulation (i.e. the DMCA) so that the total effect of the regulation is increased freedom, not decreased freedom.
You do realize that the DMCA was passed under Clinton's watch, right?
A two-party system theoretically forces moderate views and compromise instead of ending up with multiple warring parties sharing power.
Well, either that or you get two parties that are equally extreme but on opposite ends of the spectrum. Moderates then have to go with the party they find least distasteful at the moment.
The main advantage, in my humble opinion, of a two party system is government stability. The parties in a multi-party parliamentary system may better represent the views of their constituents. However, the large numbers of parties ensures that governments, when they are formed, consist of large, weak coalitions that are often unable to accomplish anything for fear of causing an allied party to go into opposition.
Indeed, if Washington had not chosen to run, political parties would have formed much sooner, for no one else had the broad base of support he did, and therefore they would have had to organize their supporters (in other words, create a political party).
As a sibling AC has said, the choice is not always the consumer's.
As an example, when my parents moved to this country, they did not want to get a credit card. They (quite rightly) saw that it was all too easy to fall into a cycle of debt that would be nigh impossible to escape. Yet, because they were recent immigrants and had no other credit history, they were constantly running into trouble getting services (like car rentals, apartment leases, etc.) without having a credit card. Eventually they did get a credit card and put a few small charges on it so that they could have something on their credit record.
The fallacy is in supposing that "unrelated" goods are, in fact, unrelated. In an ideal free market, one would not require a credit check to rent a car. But, the real world is not an ideal free market, and that's where libertarian thought runs into problems as it tries to apply pure lassiez-faire solutions to markets that are in fact quite far removed from the capitalistic ideal.
If they take money from your credit card without you authorizing it, you can contact your credit card company and request a charge back. If you already have a payment plan, however, you have essentially pre-authorized payments, which makes getting the money back much more difficult.
That's one thing I find somewhat hypocritical of many libertarian thinkers. Its not okay when the government infringes on your privacy, but its perfectly okay when some corporation does so.
Not to mention the fact that Dia has has stability issues of late on Windows.
Why move to Europe? I mean, its not like they'll not be restricting the system so that it only works over Europe. Why not just buy a Galileo receiver (when they become available)?
Also, isn't Galileo supposed to be backwards compatible with GPS?
I don't know. There's a pretty strong xenophobic bent in France and Germany (quite understandable, given that the "native" population is undergoing negative growth). So, given that, the French populace might be willing to accept someone who says that they're going to "preserve French culture", and view this sort of thing as collateral damage inflicted in the course of a greater good.
Second, you can't ignore the power of selective enforcement when it comes to these kinds of things. I mean, who's to say that the average Frenchman/Frenchwoman won't feel the effect of this legislation, while an immigrant to France will have to face all sorts of rigmarole to get their Internet service reconnected after they've been accused of illegal file sharing for the nth time. All the while, the police agencies are going to trumpet the fact that the immigrants are stealing French content and depriving hardworking French writers and artists of their due.
As I allude to in the title of this post, France already has had one neo-conservative president (Sarkozy), and the French public is fully capable of electing another.
I'm usually not much of a grammar Nazi, but you should probably realize that prescribe and proscribe are almost antonyms.
The OS is presumed to be Windows unless the article mentions otherwise; Linux and Mac botnets are sufficiently rare that discovery of one still provokes comment, whereas Windows botnets are common enough to talk about without having to specifically mention that they're on Windows.
To be fair, though, that's the major attack vector for Windows users too. There aren't a whole lot of zero-day attacks out there for Windows; most worms, trojans, etc. propagate via users who haven't bothered to patch their machines.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that the Linux userbase is still more security conscious than the Windows userbase.