Heh;). "Error: your universe is either busy or has become unstable. Press Enter to continue, or press Ctrl-Alt-Delete again to restart."
Still, there's a difference: at least with a black hole, you can wait a few universe-lifetimes until Hawking radiation evaporates your way out.. with Windows, you're screwed for All Eternity.
Um, I guess no one here's heard of what MS did with XP SP1.. if you upgraded from XP, and were using a pirated corporate key, you were OK.. but if you tried to do a slipstreamed CD install (that is, with SP1 included on CD, a full install from that CD), you were SOL when you tried the old key. A Friend Of A Friend of mine had some trouble with that himself.. but luckily some smart person had apparently held back some of the corporate keys from wider release, fearing that this might happen, and released the new key as the SP1 key.
Thus, a single keycode getting out isn't THAT much of a piracy threat - it can easily be patched. Now, a KEYGEN, on the other hand...
I always just assumed the prefix was to denote the number of triple-digit groups after a thousand.. hence, a million has one, a billion has two, and a trillion three. Although you have a point in that it could also be logical to have a million being 10^6, a billion being 10^12 and a trillion 10^18.. thus making each 10^6 another 'illion'.. but then again, it's probably too late to fix it. If we had used that method, though, people would be able to speak of much larger numbers more easily, without having to muck around with those silly metric unit systems which change the prefix on you every thousand or so..
..is not, as I keep telling people, to stop 'copyright infringement' - oh, no. They know enough people will still consider themselves morally required to buy from them (since who wants to be a 'pirate'? Arr, matey!..).
What they're really after is killing P2P as a distribution mechanism, painting it as only a tool for piracy. They're afraid people will realize that the RIAA and its shills are old-media companies that use an outdated physical method of distribution - and an outdated 'physical property' idea of music and information. They can't conceive of, and don't WANT TO conceive of, a marketplace without physical objects being bought and sold - especially since that's all they know how to do, and if music and art distribution moves to the Internet en masse, the diaRIAA will be up Shit Creek without the proverbial paddle.
What the fsck? Every time I hear something about Cheery Old England, it becomes a stranger and stranger place... after this, I almost consider 'Trigger Happy TV' to be the English equivalent of '60 Minutes'..
Yep, this is an argument that's been hashed out, over and over again, in many fora.. and the conclusion most have come to, when the actual artists have stepped in to make a statement?.. they like it when more people listen to their music, even if they don't pay for it at first. No publicity is bad publicity, right?..
The RIAA doesn't seem to realize they're nailing their own coffin shut - no, scratch that, they're SEALING THEIR COFFINS WITH LEAD, by suing and victimizing the very people they expect to pay them for their overpriced plastic junk. That's why, from now on, if I like an artist's music enough to buy their work, I'm sending the money directly to THEM, not to the slavemasters.
And how much should one send?.. well, according to ASCAP, $2.00 per $17.00 cd is a 'reasonable amount' for artist royalties.. so by sending them, say, $5, I'm paying them 250% what they would have gotten. Then I can find the music from whichever source I want, and feel good about it, too.
Exactly!.. and grog.. I think grog has something to do with it.. and 'pieces of eight,' whatever they are. Oh, well, I'd better *cough*ARR*cough* get back to work..
Exactly. Here's where the real thrust of the law comes into play - it's meant to serve as a deterrent, not to be impartially, universally enforced. And so, like capital punishment, it merely serves to ruin a few, while scaring the many into compliance out of fear. Is this how we want our government to work, by the fiat of corporations?.. then again, perhaps that's what they want, to eventually criminalize the entire populace, so they can control us through selective enforcement..
As I'm sure many others have already stated.. the point isn't to make $100 trillion off of students; they're probably not crazy enough to think they can get more than a pittance from each. The point is to crucify these four scapegoats on the cross of copyright, and put all the rest of the 'pirates' on notice that they're next. It's a selective enforcement of a law, intended to serve as an example - and as such, is patently unfair to the few unlucky enough to be picked for martyrdom.
But it grew to such proportions, and touched in so many ideas central to this debate, that I felt it was appropriate to post here. Take it or leave it, mod me down, or up.. but at least read it - I just want to get a few ideas out there.
--begin rant--
So you admit, then, that the RIAA *is* evil. That's a start. But you still think it's OK for these students to be sued for $150,000 per violation?.. (since you didn't say you disagreed with the law..) - that's just ridiculous. A law shouldn't be used to make examples of people (like capital punishment is, enforced so selectively that a lot of people who 'should' get it don't, and some innocents are caught in its web..) - it should be a balanced response to a problem in society (and I believe only problems that cause intentional harm *to* society), that mitigates the problem by providing a reasonable consequence to the officially-disapproved-of action.
Intellectual property laws are not, not, not 'good laws'. They are not part of the 'social contract' - John Locke would fucking roll over in his grave if he'd heard of them. These latest laws - like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act - were specifically designed at the behest of the rich, powerful corporations (like Disney and the RIAA) who happen to own the intellectual property of others - in the instance of Disney, they own the animators' and writers' work, and the RIAA owns singers' work. They make money - loads of money - off of other people's work, merely to provide distribution (and in Disney's case, production) methods. They are not making these laws to provide a balanced good for society to protect artistic works and methods in the future - just look at patent laws, for god's sake. They were made to throw a bone to the rich (who contribute huge amounts to the politicians who make the laws - just look at the amount Hollywood and record labels pay them), to keep them rich and keep the people from getting the use out of the very 'intellectual property' the laws protect.
These laws are the reason books by HG Wells are still under copyright 80 years later, the reason you can't photocopy your high school graduation picture.. hell, they're the reason you can't even so much as draw and distribute a fucking picture of Mickey Fucking Mouse without Disney suing you. They're the reason fansites are operating on shaky ground, and can get shut down without warning (remember when Lucasarts did that with the Star Wars fansites?) - these companies are rich and powerful, but dumb and old. They're perfectly willing to take people who love their product and would like nothing better than to support the creators of said product, and ruin them, just to get a point across - you don't own your culture, we own your culture, and if you want to participate in this culture, you've gotta Buy Our Stuff.
It's the face of exploitative consumerism. That's why people are forced to buy something before they get a chance to see it once (and the same reason, like you said, that people aren't willing to buy something after they see it on Cartoon Network and it turns out to suck - for a thought example, let's say I was somewhat interested in Inuyasha until I saw it CN and discovered it was yet another find-all-the-magic-orb-pieces anime, which I dislike. I might've ended up buying it had I not first been exposed to it FOR FREE. So, there, I got a chance to see something and I decided not to buy it. And just how is that different from getting the same thing for free on a P2P network? Maybe that's what happened to Catgirl Nuku Nuku - perhaps people saw it and decided it wasn't worth purchasing the rest of the series, because it just wasn't worth $30 a DVD package, maybe? Not everyone has the money to afford that kind of thing. The number of people who saw the fansubs is the nearly sam
Looks like the animatrix site is holding up surprisingly well under the/. onslaught. I'm D/Ling both first *and* second eps (not streaming, streaming's an awful idea, since some QT plugins don't even allow saving.. what a fucking waste..), and I'm getting 260-270k/sec total from their server.
The AI Technocore must be very willing for the humans to download these episodes.. what's in them?.. subliminal messages telling us it's all just fiction, most likely.. after all, where better to hide the Matrix idea than in plain sight?..;)
Oh, and one might wish (if one has a strong stomach) to check out MediaFarce, er, MediaForce's 'news' page, which consists almost completely of three things:
1) Dire warnings of the Danger To The Music Industry posed by P2P 'piracy', with typically inflated 'lost sales figures'
2) Self-congratulatory posting of arrests and sentencing of 'pirates', and
3) Examples of the many lovely uses of Mediaforce's 'technology' to curb the Demon Menace of Piracy.
I wonder what someone who works at Mediaforce (or Overpeer) looks like. I mean, does the mark of Satan show, or what?..
Seems a lot of people are asking 'what are these letters? are they written by real people or are they automated?'
The answer is as simple as checking out Mediaforce's chilling, Orwell-meets-NetNanny site ("Copyright protection made SO SIMPLE, all you see are RESULTS!")
Check out this short list of their 'services'...
SOLUTIONS
The company offers solutions to address a full range of client needs:
Monitoring & Reporting Solutions: Our clients leverage our best-of-breed technology to monitor infringement trends and compliance.
DCMA [sic] Compliance Solutions: Using MediaForce's fully automated processes, our clients leverage the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to protect their copyrighted material. MediaForce manages the notice, takedown, and counterclaim processes, which often prove burdensome to copyright holders.
Exchange Solutions: Using our relationships with industry media partners, we offer services which permit holders of pirated works to exchange them for licensed copies of the original recordings.
Piracy Decoy Services: Building on our unique visibility into peer-to-peer file exchanges, we offer solutions which minimize the distribution of pirated works across the Internet.
Oh, I especially love their use of the word 'solution'. One would think a 'solution' was something that fixes things, right? Except when a 'solution' consists of deliberately corrupting files, injecting handmade P2P virii into the networks, and of course.. don't forget those lovely automated attack-lawyer spams - "fully automated processes" which "leverage the DMCA".
I'd write more, but frankly, if I click any more of their links, I think I may vomit on my keyboard, and that shit's hard to clean off.
Are you joking? It gets amended all the time - they've even got amendments to disarm earlier amendments, like Prohibition.. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of the knee-jerk public-hysteria amendments, mark my words..
You know what'll happen now... the DOE and Homeland Security, having been caught with their pants down - no, make that with their pants down, peeing ON THE SIDE OF THE TOILET, will be so embarrassed they'll immediately go for shooting the messenger for the message, and put poor Noah in jail.
I hope he thought of that before he published in Wired.. then again, maybe that's part of the plan for Becoming A Real Journalist - get arrested for your cause! I hope the ACLU and/or Wired (if they're loyal to their reporters) can get him off of the felony trespassing rap the gov will slap him with..
*sigh*.. I know, I hate to be a nitpicker, but the keyboard layout shown in the image is quite obviously QWERTY..
(quote from the TypeMatrix FAQ: "[Q:]How long does it take to get used to the TypeMatrix keyboard? [A:]This is a standard QWERTY keyboard. However, since the Enter and Backspace keys are now in the center, and the rows have been straightened, a learning period is necessary.")
Still, I guess the context of the comment indicates that you probably didn't mean to write dvorak, so I suppose this reply will only serve to clarify the situation for the few people who might have been a little confused by this. But other than that, sure, this looks like a good keyboard. Just gotta buy a few little stickers to put over the incorrect key labels..
Re:'Cashless society'?.. more like 'privacy-less'
on
The Future of Money
·
· Score: 1
*chuckles*.. well, of course, most/. posters have dual allegiances: free will and technology. When a technology comes along that appears to have a lot of useful potential - but which can be used to deprive people of their rights - they have trouble deciding which to support. Often the approach is simply "let the technology develop and deal with problems as they occur" - however, it doesn't take a genius to see that the problems will be *built in* - unless we make the topic of anonymous electronic cash a public issue, it's more than likely that e-cash will be as easy to track as credit cards are today.
*sigh*.. didn't they try this, with the Enclave idea off the coast of Britain?.. and didn't the British gov't mysteriously hush it up and eventually stop that idea by redefining its borders without their consent?.. *shrugs*.. international law matters little to superpowers.. just ask the Bushes.. (mod -1, troll?:)
The point is - unless you can find a small nation willing to risk the ire of the world for being a 'terrorist enabler' (ie., providing secure monetary and data reserves), we won't have a real Data/Money haven. Even the Carribean island money havens are drying up..
'Cashless society'?.. more like 'privacy-less'
on
The Future of Money
·
· Score: 1
I've heard the arguments for 'cashless societies' before.. mostly they circle around the real argument and come at it from the 'save the trees from being cut down for paper' or 'avoid losing your money!' aspect.. but the REAL issue here is whether people should have the right, and the ability (since those two don't always go together!) to conduct exchanges of value without said exchanges being recorded/observed/surveilled by the government or other outside parties. Even so-called 'digital cash' plans are not 'true' cash in that respect - many of such plans I've seen include 'fingerprinting' or 'user identification' which make them more like debit cards for all intents and purposes - except that, unlike a debit card, they also have the added disadvantage of not having corroboration of their value elsewhere, so if you lose it, you're still screwed (unless the person finding it is nice enough to check the user ID and return it to you). They totally skip over the privacy and anonymity of true 'cash'. And don't get started on how digital cash with 'user fingerprinting' will be safer than good old dumb folding money (or, horrors, gold) - if you don't have a user identification system check every time a transaction is completed, then there will be no way to check whether 'stolen' money is being used in a purchase, and thus no way to get your stolen money back.. so, if you want privacy, you can't really have security, and vice versa.
Ah, but then of course there are the ideas like e-gold, which combine privacy (ie, encryption and anonymous digital IDs) with security (ie, no one but that user can use the money).. like a Swiss bank account.. except, of course, the gov's are doing all they can to shut them down, under the guise of 'preventing terrorism' (but I think their real complaint is 'we can't get at the money for taxes')..
Slashdot Mirror
Heh ;). "Error: your universe is either busy or has become unstable. Press Enter to continue, or press Ctrl-Alt-Delete again to restart."
Still, there's a difference: at least with a black hole, you can wait a few universe-lifetimes until Hawking radiation evaporates your way out.. with Windows, you're screwed for All Eternity.
Not an XP keygen, you, ahem MORON, I meant a keygen for 2003. Ever hear of context?
Um, I guess no one here's heard of what MS did with XP SP1.. if you upgraded from XP, and were using a pirated corporate key, you were OK.. but if you tried to do a slipstreamed CD install (that is, with SP1 included on CD, a full install from that CD), you were SOL when you tried the old key. A Friend Of A Friend of mine had some trouble with that himself.. but luckily some smart person had apparently held back some of the corporate keys from wider release, fearing that this might happen, and released the new key as the SP1 key.
Thus, a single keycode getting out isn't THAT much of a piracy threat - it can easily be patched. Now, a KEYGEN, on the other hand...
"thats almost $400 million"..
;).
Million
Heh. Nitpicking for fun and profit. Well, no profit as yet, but I'm working on that step.
I always just assumed the prefix was to denote the number of triple-digit groups after a thousand.. hence, a million has one, a billion has two, and a trillion three. Although you have a point in that it could also be logical to have a million being 10^6, a billion being 10^12 and a trillion 10^18.. thus making each 10^6 another 'illion'.. but then again, it's probably too late to fix it. If we had used that method, though, people would be able to speak of much larger numbers more easily, without having to muck around with those silly metric unit systems which change the prefix on you every thousand or so..
I know, I know, I was trying.. to be 'funny' ;).. guess I'll have to study up on how humans think better before trying my next Irkin invasion..
..is not, as I keep telling people, to stop 'copyright infringement' - oh, no. They know enough people will still consider themselves morally required to buy from them (since who wants to be a 'pirate'? Arr, matey!..). What they're really after is killing P2P as a distribution mechanism, painting it as only a tool for piracy. They're afraid people will realize that the RIAA and its shills are old-media companies that use an outdated physical method of distribution - and an outdated 'physical property' idea of music and information. They can't conceive of, and don't WANT TO conceive of, a marketplace without physical objects being bought and sold - especially since that's all they know how to do, and if music and art distribution moves to the Internet en masse, the diaRIAA will be up Shit Creek without the proverbial paddle.
What the fsck? Every time I hear something about Cheery Old England, it becomes a stranger and stranger place... after this, I almost consider 'Trigger Happy TV' to be the English equivalent of '60 Minutes'..
Yep, this is an argument that's been hashed out, over and over again, in many fora.. and the conclusion most have come to, when the actual artists have stepped in to make a statement?.. they like it when more people listen to their music, even if they don't pay for it at first. No publicity is bad publicity, right?..
The RIAA doesn't seem to realize they're nailing their own coffin shut - no, scratch that, they're SEALING THEIR COFFINS WITH LEAD, by suing and victimizing the very people they expect to pay them for their overpriced plastic junk. That's why, from now on, if I like an artist's music enough to buy their work, I'm sending the money directly to THEM, not to the slavemasters.
And how much should one send?.. well, according to ASCAP, $2.00 per $17.00 cd is a 'reasonable amount' for artist royalties.. so by sending them, say, $5, I'm paying them 250% what they would have gotten. Then I can find the music from whichever source I want, and feel good about it, too.
Exactly!.. and grog.. I think grog has something to do with it.. and 'pieces of eight,' whatever they are. Oh, well, I'd better *cough*ARR*cough* get back to work..
Exactly. Here's where the real thrust of the law comes into play - it's meant to serve as a deterrent, not to be impartially, universally enforced. And so, like capital punishment, it merely serves to ruin a few, while scaring the many into compliance out of fear. Is this how we want our government to work, by the fiat of corporations?.. then again, perhaps that's what they want, to eventually criminalize the entire populace, so they can control us through selective enforcement..
As I'm sure many others have already stated.. the point isn't to make $100 trillion off of students; they're probably not crazy enough to think they can get more than a pittance from each. The point is to crucify these four scapegoats on the cross of copyright, and put all the rest of the 'pirates' on notice that they're next. It's a selective enforcement of a law, intended to serve as an example - and as such, is patently unfair to the few unlucky enough to be picked for martyrdom.
Please note, first, that this started out as a reply to a comment a friend made in my blog.
But it grew to such proportions, and touched in so many ideas central to this debate, that I felt it was appropriate to post here. Take it or leave it, mod me down, or up.. but at least read it - I just want to get a few ideas out there.
--begin rant--
So you admit, then, that the RIAA *is* evil. That's a start. But you still think it's OK for these students to be sued for $150,000 per violation?.. (since you didn't say you disagreed with the law..) - that's just ridiculous. A law shouldn't be used to make examples of people (like capital punishment is, enforced so selectively that a lot of people who 'should' get it don't, and some innocents are caught in its web..) - it should be a balanced response to a problem in society (and I believe only problems that cause intentional harm *to* society), that mitigates the problem by providing a reasonable consequence to the officially-disapproved-of action.
Intellectual property laws are not, not, not 'good laws'. They are not part of the 'social contract' - John Locke would fucking roll over in his grave if he'd heard of them. These latest laws - like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act - were specifically designed at the behest of the rich, powerful corporations (like Disney and the RIAA) who happen to own the intellectual property of others - in the instance of Disney, they own the animators' and writers' work, and the RIAA owns singers' work. They make money - loads
of money - off of other people's work, merely to provide distribution (and in Disney's case, production) methods. They are not making these laws to provide a balanced good for society to protect artistic works and methods in the future - just look at patent laws, for god's sake. They were made to throw a bone to the rich (who contribute huge amounts to the politicians who make the laws - just look at the amount Hollywood and record labels pay them), to keep them rich and keep the people from getting the use out of the very 'intellectual property' the laws protect.
These laws are the reason books by HG Wells are still under copyright 80 years later, the reason you can't photocopy your high school graduation picture.. hell, they're the reason you can't even so much as draw and distribute a fucking picture of Mickey Fucking Mouse without Disney suing you. They're the reason fansites are operating on shaky ground, and can get shut down without warning (remember when Lucasarts did that with the Star Wars fansites?) - these companies are rich and powerful, but dumb and old. They're perfectly willing to take people who love their product and would like nothing better than to support the creators of said product, and ruin them, just to get a point across - you don't own your culture, we own your culture, and if you want to participate in this culture, you've gotta Buy Our Stuff.
It's the face of exploitative consumerism.
That's why people are forced to buy something before they get a chance to see it once (and the same reason, like you said, that people aren't willing to buy something after they see it on Cartoon Network and it turns out to suck - for a thought example, let's say I was somewhat interested in Inuyasha until I saw it CN and discovered it was yet another find-all-the-magic-orb-pieces anime, which I dislike. I might've ended up buying it had I not first been exposed to it FOR FREE. So, there, I got a chance to see something and I decided not to buy it. And just how is that different from getting the same thing for free on a P2P network? Maybe that's what happened to Catgirl Nuku Nuku - perhaps people saw it and decided it wasn't worth purchasing the rest of the series, because it just wasn't worth $30 a DVD package, maybe? Not everyone has the money to afford that kind of thing. The number of people who saw the fansubs is the nearly sam
The AI Technocore must be very willing for the humans to download these episodes.. what's in them?.. subliminal messages telling us it's all just fiction, most likely.. after all, where better to hide the Matrix idea than in plain sight?..
1) Dire warnings of the Danger To The Music Industry posed by P2P 'piracy', with typically inflated 'lost sales figures'
2) Self-congratulatory posting of arrests and sentencing of 'pirates', and
3) Examples of the many lovely uses of Mediaforce's 'technology' to curb the Demon Menace of Piracy.
I wonder what someone who works at Mediaforce (or Overpeer) looks like. I mean, does the mark of Satan show, or what?..
The answer is as simple as checking out Mediaforce's chilling, Orwell-meets-NetNanny site ("Copyright protection made SO SIMPLE, all you see are RESULTS!")
Check out this short list of their 'services'...
SOLUTIONS
The company offers solutions to address a full range of client needs:
Monitoring & Reporting Solutions: Our clients leverage our best-of-breed technology to monitor infringement trends and compliance.
DCMA [sic] Compliance Solutions: Using MediaForce's fully automated processes, our clients leverage the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to protect their copyrighted material. MediaForce manages the notice, takedown, and counterclaim processes, which often prove burdensome to copyright holders.
Exchange Solutions: Using our relationships with industry media partners, we offer services which permit holders of pirated works to exchange them for licensed copies of the original recordings.
Piracy Decoy Services: Building on our unique visibility into peer-to-peer file exchanges, we offer solutions which minimize the distribution of pirated works across the Internet.
Oh, I especially love their use of the word 'solution'. One would think a 'solution' was something that fixes things, right? Except when a 'solution' consists of deliberately corrupting files, injecting handmade P2P virii into the networks, and of course.. don't forget those lovely automated attack-lawyer spams - "fully automated processes" which "leverage the DMCA".
I'd write more, but frankly, if I click any more of their links, I think I may vomit on my keyboard, and that shit's hard to clean off.
I see people post anonymously for a reason. *chuckle*
Are you joking? It gets amended all the time - they've even got amendments to disarm earlier amendments, like Prohibition.. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of the knee-jerk public-hysteria amendments, mark my words..
What?.. no helicopter gunships and armed personnel carriers were dispatched?.. no snipers?.. not even one attack dog?.. even an eensy weensy attack chihuahua?
You know what'll happen now... the DOE and Homeland Security, having been caught with their pants down - no, make that with their pants down, peeing ON THE SIDE OF THE TOILET, will be so embarrassed they'll immediately go for shooting the messenger for the message, and put poor Noah in jail.
I hope he thought of that before he published in Wired.. then again, maybe that's part of the plan for Becoming A Real Journalist - get arrested for your cause! I hope the ACLU and/or Wired (if they're loyal to their reporters) can get him off of the felony trespassing rap the gov will slap him with..
*sigh*.. I know, I hate to be a nitpicker, but the keyboard layout shown in the image is quite obviously QWERTY..
(quote from the TypeMatrix FAQ: "[Q:]How long does it take to get used to the TypeMatrix keyboard?
[A:]This is a standard QWERTY keyboard. However, since the Enter and Backspace keys are now in the center, and the rows have been straightened, a learning period is necessary.")
Still, I guess the context of the comment indicates that you probably didn't mean to write dvorak, so I suppose this reply will only serve to clarify the situation for the few people who might have been a little confused by this. But other than that, sure, this looks like a good keyboard. Just gotta buy a few little stickers to put over the incorrect key labels..
*chuckles*.. well, of course, most /. posters have dual allegiances: free will and technology. When a technology comes along that appears to have a lot of useful potential - but which can be used to deprive people of their rights - they have trouble deciding which to support. Often the approach is simply "let the technology develop and deal with problems as they occur" - however, it doesn't take a genius to see that the problems will be *built in* - unless we make the topic of anonymous electronic cash a public issue, it's more than likely that e-cash will be as easy to track as credit cards are today.
*sigh*.. didn't they try this, with the Enclave idea off the coast of Britain?.. and didn't the British gov't mysteriously hush it up and eventually stop that idea by redefining its borders without their consent?.. *shrugs*.. international law matters little to superpowers.. just ask the Bushes.. (mod -1, troll? :)
The point is - unless you can find a small nation willing to risk the ire of the world for being a 'terrorist enabler' (ie., providing secure monetary and data reserves), we won't have a real Data/Money haven. Even the Carribean island money havens are drying up..
I've heard the arguments for 'cashless societies' before.. mostly they circle around the real argument and come at it from the 'save the trees from being cut down for paper' or 'avoid losing your money!' aspect.. but the REAL issue here is whether people should have the right, and the ability (since those two don't always go together!) to conduct exchanges of value without said exchanges being recorded/observed/surveilled by the government or other outside parties. Even so-called 'digital cash' plans are not 'true' cash in that respect - many of such plans I've seen include 'fingerprinting' or 'user identification' which make them more like debit cards for all intents and purposes - except that, unlike a debit card, they also have the added disadvantage of not having corroboration of their value elsewhere, so if you lose it, you're still screwed (unless the person finding it is nice enough to check the user ID and return it to you). They totally skip over the privacy and anonymity of true 'cash'. And don't get started on how digital cash with 'user fingerprinting' will be safer than good old dumb folding money (or, horrors, gold) - if you don't have a user identification system check every time a transaction is completed, then there will be no way to check whether 'stolen' money is being used in a purchase, and thus no way to get your stolen money back.. so, if you want privacy, you can't really have security, and vice versa.
Ah, but then of course there are the ideas like e-gold, which combine privacy (ie, encryption and anonymous digital IDs) with security (ie, no one but that user can use the money).. like a Swiss bank account.. except, of course, the gov's are doing all they can to shut them down, under the guise of 'preventing terrorism' (but I think their real complaint is 'we can't get at the money for taxes')..
Better still.. wireless online 3d voting porn! Finally, a cure for voter apathy!