We already produce enough food to feed the world, and there are still starving people. Whats the contradiction? Bad government. Take a look anywhere in the world where you see starving people and you will see a well-fed army/secret police which is appropriating all the food supply (including the *prodigious* amounts of aid the well-fed countries of the world throw at the problem), and, likely as not, the disruption in food production which triggered the famine was probably brought on by stupidity or deliberate sabotage in the first place (either democide-by-famine in the Soviet Ukraine, or "hey, I've got an idea, lets throw all the white farmers off their land, then we'll give it away to our political base -- no possible downside!").
The real world introduction of replicators would see well-governed nations (which are mostly already rich) get even richer, and poorly-governed nations (which are mostly already poor) get even poorer as their governments confiscated their replicators and used them for the benefit of the power-elite (more phasers to oppress the masses and cheaper rates on ballots for one-party elections! Sweet!). And lots of Western academics would say "See, this is why we need socialism, look at how capitalism produces rich and poor people and inequitably distributes the wealth of the world", because academics who have never actually had their stuff ganked by a totalitarian mob have a very rozy view of the whole process.
Yeah, thats not happening. If you've got content-for-money and don't want to trust the tip-jar model, you need some sort of system to separate people who have paid from people who haven't paid. You could take pains to totally split your content server from your authentication server. Imagine a carnival where you buy tickets in one booth and buy access to attractions with tickets only. The booth selling you tickets only needs to know that your money is green and that you are buying some service in the carnival, and the booth letting you into Heather's House of Horrors only knows that you've got a ticket whose hash is valid. However, assuming that someone actually *cares* that you went into HHH, they'll just get your subscription and ask the HHH attendant, and you've got no guarantee he doesn't remember you. In the same manner, the feds could always just subpoena server logs and grep for your IP address.
The other problem is that no content provider, and few customers, actually benefits from this system. They use it at the carnival because they don't trust their minimum-wage employees with money and some other ancillary benefits of microcurrencies (makes you spend more than you intended, what have you). But for an online business, "what our customers buy" is not just useful, its their *lifeblood*. Take a look at the value Amazon gets out of cross-referencing buying habits, both in aggregate ("People Who Like Harry Potter like...") and specific to you (recommenations, which are basically taking the aggregate data and splicing that with what they know about you from past purchases). Heck, their database is probably as important to them as their tech or brand name.
Nor do most customers care. There was never a golden age of privacy in commercial transactions, since you always have to arrange delivery of the goods and payments and that always leaves records (even if they're only memories). Even if there had been a golden age, hello, credit cards, supermarket value cards, and data mining software. Its dead and most people couldn't care less. Sure, you can scare people a little with "Dubya and the NSA can subpoena your library records" but that ceases to scare (mostly because the dangers of it are vastly oversold and the usual suspects warn about this every two weeks whether they need to or not -- see the +5 mods which are probably already above and below this comment).
Nobody ever came to Microsoft software expecting greatness. They expected it would be like their electricity: there when they needed it and requiring dedicated attention pretty close to never. Do you think most business drones using Word care that it produces junky, ugly, standards non-compliant HTML? No. Most of them can't even *spell* HTML, and *this is normal*. It works good enough and it lets them get back to the business of their business.
Yeah, I use Bank of America, and their SafeKey thing, well, points for effort guys. I barely understood what was going on and I knew, going into the signup, what the whole purpose was. Basically, it works like this: you're told to pick a picture from a random set of them. When you sign into the bank, signon takes two steps if its from a computer that hasn't used your account recently: first, you put in your userID and state. Then you are taken to a *second* page, which shows the photo you picked and asks for your password. The idea is the photo is another secret known only to you and the bank, so if you go to The Bank of America Website you'll see that the photo was not the one you picked, and so you'll realize "Wow, phiser! No thanks"
Here's the problem: the whole rationale behind the process goes WAY over the head of the average user. I watch my non-technical sister signing up for this thing. You might as well have written the interface in Chinese (oh, bad example, she reads that fine -- Swahili, then). And I had to spend 15 minutes looking through pages of randomly generated photos (they're all clipart of iconic things -- a bowl of fruit, a watch, etc) until I found one that I'd remember after two months without seeing it. For my mother (the archetypical phishing victim, knows nothing about technology and forwards every "If you send this to 15 people Bill Gates will cure cancer!" email she gets), I think this whole process would be hopeless.
All of the illegal stuff gets *expensive* fast. I lurk over at specialham.com, the spammer forum, to keep abreast of new changes I need to make to the spam filter I'm coding. People want several hundred dollars for a script to verify addresses for one major ISP, etc. And "cashers" have the most dangerous job in the criminal supply chain, since they're the ones that have to associate a physical identity (even a fake or obfuascated one) with the theft to make their money. The guy who just nabs the information, on the other hand, just has to go to the forum/IRC channel, demonstrate his bona-fides, and then arrange a swap with payment dropped into some blind eGold account (the black market doesn't apparently like paypal that much, from what I've seen).
Yep, you can get all of these things at the local Internet cafe in GIFU for $4 an hour (Gifu is a prefecture in Japan which is so rural that I was suprised we had running water, to say nothing of gigabit ethernet -- although my apartment doesn't have a shower or heated water, curses...)
eventually choke on your tie when it gets stuck in your Dell
Last Friday I was setting up a new Linux box to blast spam through. My tie got stuck in the whaddyacallit, bezel?, the metal thing that was keeping the SCSI drive in, and I didn't notice until a coworker called me to the telephone. I jumped out of my seat to get to the phone, or tried to anyway. Darn thing was a loadstone around my neck and I dragged it into my lap. Lost a sound card and a darn good tie. But it was a Gateway, so my 8 year record of safe Dell operation is unblemished.
Lesson learned: casual Fridays are for your own protection.
Of course. You should be red, like any other self-respecting Party member. (Side note: Did you know that in the US military the enemy in excercizes is always "The Red Team" and in China its "The Blue Team", while both swap the colors for their own sides? I recall there being an anti-PRC think tank in Washington which calls itself "Blue Team" for just that reason.)
I really don't get why "conservative" groups would *not* want it...it would make filtering (for sites following the rules) so trivial it'd be ridiculous.
I don't mind measures to make porn less accessible on the Internet. I just mind stupid measures to make porn less accessible on the Internet. I would have to get raging drunk and lobotomize out everything I know about human nature and technology to think, for an instant, that this would be in any way successful. The problem is that whole "for sites following the rules" bit. It is sort of like CAN-SPAM: hey, if spammers put [ADV] in their subject lines, well wouldn't that be swell. Show of hands here: how many people got an [ADV] spam in, say, the last year? How many have spam loads which are so much as 1% [ADV]-tagged? Bueler? Bueler? I'm generally opposed to laws which purport to solve a problem and don't because they convince people, who are not experts as to the effect of laws, that the problem is solved and doesn't need more fixing. "Don't we already have a spam law? Don't we already have effective regulation of Internet porn? Didn't we pass the bill you would have wanted last year?" No, no, no. Go back to the drawing board and find me something which couldn't be circumvented by a webmaster with a two-digit IQ, then we'll talk.
If you want less nannying regarding the Internet, why on earth would you vote for Hillary Clinton? She and Joe Lieberman are frequently to the right of Republicans on most "civil liberties in tech" issues -- check out their broadsides against the gaming industry, etc.
... that in 2006 the Paper of Record can print an article asking, with a straight face, "So how do you feel about itemization?" Its like I'm seeing a brave new world with strange new technology becoming part of the general knowledge you assume people have about society. I'm having one of my "WoW, I'm feeling kind of old, I remember when they had to explain concepts like 'e-mail' so that the masses would get it" and I only turned 24 this month...
Suppose you join a bowling league. You're out with your bowling friends one or several nights a week for a few hours. You put a little of your spending cash (although not so much) into buying new balls, shoes, etc. You gradually become more skilled at bowling, which accomplishes nothing for you in terms of non-bowling skills (aside from perhaps causing the odd jibe from non-bowling friends about your new status as The Bowler). The same could be said of gardening, or golf, or any number of non-professional hobbies. And you know what? Good for bowlers/gardeners/golfers/WoW players. Most the vast majority of them, its a monetarily-cheap time-expensive hobby with minimal social effects compared to many socially-acceptable hobbies (whens the last time you heard a WoW player get into a head-on collision with a family of four after a late night in Molten Core? Because that happens to drinking buddies all the time.)
Bottom line: if a WoW player or anyone else can handle their other commitments along with their hobby, if they get good reviews at the job, if their family feels loved, if they go to church on Sunday or put in time at the food pantry or whatever, whats the harm?
America isn't known for its outstanding education system.
Yes. That is why you see any American student who can possibly make the entrance requirements and foot the bill going to China, India, Korea, or Saudi Arabia to study. Thats why American and Mexican politicians alike like to start their resume off with a good credential like a degree from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. And why if you go to the math department at a great Russian school you'd better have majored in English because thats what 50% of your classmates will be most comfortable in.
Seriously, while I'm quite prepared to accept that American education is very unexceptional for a first-world country through, say, high-school, the world is beating a path to the door of American universities for a reason. This isn't to say that good schools in, say, the UK or Japan aren't excellent places (they are) or that the very best school in, say, Mexico isn't a great place to be (that would be the aforementioned UNAM, and it probably is) or that there aren't a gazillion problems in higher education (oh, don't even get me started). All these things are true. But regardless, American universities are justifiably the envy of the world.
Working at a Japanese technology incubator makes me wonder whether I should laugh politely at jokes like this or slap my head in frustration (now, for the Insightful mods, thats a fairly obvious head-slap decision). "The Japanese" haven't invested in supple-skinned robots. One research institute invested in supple-skinned robots, and got some press because it makes good copy. Meanwhile, hundreds upon hundreds of laboratories, including one which is one floor below me, have made robots to do industrial work, assist old folks, do disaster recovery, explore the sea floor, provide pet-level companionship, help people with spinal injuries walk again, etc etc etc. Its like saying "You know what Americans invented the Internet for? Duh, porn, who couldn't have seen that coming. Oh well, everyone knew Americans were crazy sex fiends, as we could have easily gathered from a representative survey of American literature like Porky's, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and American Pie." These sort of generalizations contain a bit of truth with a whole lot of stupid. (Side note: stupid makes an excellent noun.)
Then there's always "piratedmovie_highquality_rippebyhaxors.mov.exe". Hey, if it works for exploiting folks through email, it will work for exploiting them through p2p networks, via inattentiveness, long file names which make people ignore the extension, or operating systems which are set to hide known extensions by default.
Doesn't Google use link text to heavily bias what it perceives as the content of an article? For example, if I were to do something malicious like say some politician I don't care for is a miserable failure that primes a Google bomb for the search term "miserable failure" even if the target page doesn't have miserable or failure on it. Given that Slashdot is a high PR site (PR9?), its link text swings around quite a lot of weight. But who searches for things like "article" or "interview"?
This might be a quite radical conception about the hyperlink, but I think that the overwhelming majority of human users are using a browser which shows context around the link so it doesn't matter whether you say click here or link or "I found the most interesting description of how to build a Beowolf cluster of hot grits while I was browsing Slashdot earlier today", the user will be able to know what the link pertains to regardless. The only major group of users who really need that extra reinforcement in the link text are spiders (and, because I should make at least a token effort to recognize that usability is important, folks with clients which have an extremely small "field of vision" whether thats because of their client not being on a traditional PC or because their client is non-visual). Both of these user groups benefit a heck of a lot more from "Mother of the Internet" than they do from "article".
1) Topic: Securing your mainframes from insects and rodents.
2) Wasted CPU cycles and how you can prevent them.
3) Proper punch card disposal protocols.
The point? We have *no clue* what the computer will look fifty years from now, to say nothing of the security environment. Todays threats will be laughable in light of the technology and practices of tomorrow (many of the threats we spend a lot of time worrying about, such as spyware, are features not of all computing, not even of a particular application class, but that plague one particular implementation of an application which just happens to have a majority share of the market today -- who can say whether a security researcher in 2056 will even remember the words "Internet Explorer" from his history class or whether browsing any analogue to the Internet will be a common activity?). Prognosticating the threat environment that far out is a waste of time. Look to the near term (next 5 years: spam, viruses, malware) and address the perinneals (dumb users, men on the inside, etc) rather than trying to prognosticate what year we'll have the computer equivalent of flying cars.
You're 99% right, with the exception of the part about server-side resources. A "masively massive" server side program which met the other implied constraints (useful for a long time, used by a lot of people, aimed at a very experienced user population) would fit the OSS model like a glove. I'm thinking, say, Apache or MySQL, which can certainly operate in massively massive configurations as well as driving a blog kept on a 3-PC intranet.
China can certainly imprison one or two, or one hundred or two hundred, free speech activists, but the way they extend that level of control to scale to a billion people is by taking one flawed-but-reasonably-effective censorship system and combine it with arbitrary enforcement. Then, you'll act like Big Brother is watching you even if he isn't necessarily -- and besides, the information you wanted to get at is likely unreadable anyway, so your cost-benefits calculation always comes down to "probably best not to try anything outside of the box". As China starts to block more and more of the Net which savvy Chinese need in the course of not just "disreputable political activism" but their daily lives (access to, say, the BBC or WSJ or for that matter the latest economic news printed in a Taiwanese daily that happens to be pro-independence), a program which achieved the sort of mindshare that Napster used to have would be impossible to stop. What are you going to do, arrest the whole Chinese-speaking Internet?
I think thats the key to beating the Firewall -- make the attack *scale*. I'm not sure this particular piece of software accomplishes that. Plus, at the very least, dissent online provides a bit of a safety valve. Sure, the Chinese government *could* decide to come down pretty hard on folks trying to access overseas sites... but they already *do* come down very hard on folks trying analagous activities in meatspace. Not that the activities are perfect substitutes for each other, but if you try to meet a group of, say, Falun Gong adherents to have a chitchat about the health benefits of meditation online, its possible you'll get caught. If you try it by trying to track down a Falun Gong practitioner through the grapevine your exposure is orders of magnitude worst (can you guarantee every person who chances to overhear one of your conversations won't go straight to the cops?)
There will never be another Counter-Strike for fear that someone will make a whorehouse map.
I'd settle for there not being another Counter-Strike which came with "pimp and ho" models and skins on the disk. Its not like somebody said "Whoa, shoot, I just spent the last 6 hours in Maya coding a model and, come to think of it, thats anatomically accurate and it happened to make it onto the gold master." There is just deeply disfunctional management and culture when a $N million dollar project "just so happens" to have boobies on the disk. The gaming companies need to get their own house in order or else they're going to be regulated by external forces with a lot heavier hand then just a simple "keep the pixel porn at home, guys" rule would impose.
... they actually want to make redownloading take a telephone call, which will severely limit the access for it. Otherwise, they'll get somebody, somewhere who buys $3,000 worth of music and then get that account's username and password passed around the internets and before you know it its been "redownloaded" 50,000 times. Sure, they could put some sort of technological limiter on it, but we all know every DRM system gets gamed. Keeping a human in the loop gives a chance to catch the gaming and, at minimum, severely reduces the speed people could game at.
I think it was probably from a computerized flame generator. The sentences are individually syntactically meaningful but there is no sense to them. This is partially covered up by generous use of indefinite antecedents, with you the reader pressed into service to fill the gaps. These are both features of a simple random text generator -- there are ones all over the Internet that will cook up flames or complaint letters for you, and I wrote a few as an undergraduate AI student. With a very limited problem domain, some trickery, and discarding a lot of junk texts you can pass the output off as accurate to someone who isn't looking for it and won't examine it closely (I snuck some haiku past a literature teacher in with a bunch of real undergraduate haiku -- one of them got high marks).
If you've got the stomach to start writing up lots of sentence patterns you can code this sort of thing up in gawk (or perl, if you're concerned about other people reading your code to steal your bright idea) in less than an hour.
Slashdot Mirror
The real world introduction of replicators would see well-governed nations (which are mostly already rich) get even richer, and poorly-governed nations (which are mostly already poor) get even poorer as their governments confiscated their replicators and used them for the benefit of the power-elite (more phasers to oppress the masses and cheaper rates on ballots for one-party elections! Sweet!). And lots of Western academics would say "See, this is why we need socialism, look at how capitalism produces rich and poor people and inequitably distributes the wealth of the world", because academics who have never actually had their stuff ganked by a totalitarian mob have a very rozy view of the whole process.
The other problem is that no content provider, and few customers, actually benefits from this system. They use it at the carnival because they don't trust their minimum-wage employees with money and some other ancillary benefits of microcurrencies (makes you spend more than you intended, what have you). But for an online business, "what our customers buy" is not just useful, its their *lifeblood*. Take a look at the value Amazon gets out of cross-referencing buying habits, both in aggregate ("People Who Like Harry Potter like ...") and specific to you (recommenations, which are basically taking the aggregate data and splicing that with what they know about you from past purchases). Heck, their database is probably as important to them as their tech or brand name.
Nor do most customers care. There was never a golden age of privacy in commercial transactions, since you always have to arrange delivery of the goods and payments and that always leaves records (even if they're only memories). Even if there had been a golden age, hello, credit cards, supermarket value cards, and data mining software. Its dead and most people couldn't care less. Sure, you can scare people a little with "Dubya and the NSA can subpoena your library records" but that ceases to scare (mostly because the dangers of it are vastly oversold and the usual suspects warn about this every two weeks whether they need to or not -- see the +5 mods which are probably already above and below this comment).
Nobody ever came to Microsoft software expecting greatness. They expected it would be like their electricity: there when they needed it and requiring dedicated attention pretty close to never. Do you think most business drones using Word care that it produces junky, ugly, standards non-compliant HTML? No. Most of them can't even *spell* HTML, and *this is normal*. It works good enough and it lets them get back to the business of their business.
Here's the problem: the whole rationale behind the process goes WAY over the head of the average user. I watch my non-technical sister signing up for this thing. You might as well have written the interface in Chinese (oh, bad example, she reads that fine -- Swahili, then). And I had to spend 15 minutes looking through pages of randomly generated photos (they're all clipart of iconic things -- a bowl of fruit, a watch, etc) until I found one that I'd remember after two months without seeing it. For my mother (the archetypical phishing victim, knows nothing about technology and forwards every "If you send this to 15 people Bill Gates will cure cancer!" email she gets), I think this whole process would be hopeless.
All of the illegal stuff gets *expensive* fast. I lurk over at specialham.com, the spammer forum, to keep abreast of new changes I need to make to the spam filter I'm coding. People want several hundred dollars for a script to verify addresses for one major ISP, etc. And "cashers" have the most dangerous job in the criminal supply chain, since they're the ones that have to associate a physical identity (even a fake or obfuascated one) with the theft to make their money. The guy who just nabs the information, on the other hand, just has to go to the forum/IRC channel, demonstrate his bona-fides, and then arrange a swap with payment dropped into some blind eGold account (the black market doesn't apparently like paypal that much, from what I've seen).
Yep, you can get all of these things at the local Internet cafe in GIFU for $4 an hour (Gifu is a prefecture in Japan which is so rural that I was suprised we had running water, to say nothing of gigabit ethernet -- although my apartment doesn't have a shower or heated water, curses...)
Last Friday I was setting up a new Linux box to blast spam through. My tie got stuck in the whaddyacallit, bezel?, the metal thing that was keeping the SCSI drive in, and I didn't notice until a coworker called me to the telephone. I jumped out of my seat to get to the phone, or tried to anyway. Darn thing was a loadstone around my neck and I dragged it into my lap. Lost a sound card and a darn good tie. But it was a Gateway, so my 8 year record of safe Dell operation is unblemished.
Lesson learned: casual Fridays are for your own protection.
Of course. You should be red, like any other self-respecting Party member. (Side note: Did you know that in the US military the enemy in excercizes is always "The Red Team" and in China its "The Blue Team", while both swap the colors for their own sides? I recall there being an anti-PRC think tank in Washington which calls itself "Blue Team" for just that reason.)
I don't mind measures to make porn less accessible on the Internet. I just mind stupid measures to make porn less accessible on the Internet. I would have to get raging drunk and lobotomize out everything I know about human nature and technology to think, for an instant, that this would be in any way successful. The problem is that whole "for sites following the rules" bit. It is sort of like CAN-SPAM: hey, if spammers put [ADV] in their subject lines, well wouldn't that be swell. Show of hands here: how many people got an [ADV] spam in, say, the last year? How many have spam loads which are so much as 1% [ADV]-tagged? Bueler? Bueler? I'm generally opposed to laws which purport to solve a problem and don't because they convince people, who are not experts as to the effect of laws, that the problem is solved and doesn't need more fixing. "Don't we already have a spam law? Don't we already have effective regulation of Internet porn? Didn't we pass the bill you would have wanted last year?" No, no, no. Go back to the drawing board and find me something which couldn't be circumvented by a webmaster with a two-digit IQ, then we'll talk.
If you want less nannying regarding the Internet, why on earth would you vote for Hillary Clinton? She and Joe Lieberman are frequently to the right of Republicans on most "civil liberties in tech" issues -- check out their broadsides against the gaming industry, etc.
... that in 2006 the Paper of Record can print an article asking, with a straight face, "So how do you feel about itemization?" Its like I'm seeing a brave new world with strange new technology becoming part of the general knowledge you assume people have about society. I'm having one of my "WoW, I'm feeling kind of old, I remember when they had to explain concepts like 'e-mail' so that the masses would get it" and I only turned 24 this month...
Bottom line: if a WoW player or anyone else can handle their other commitments along with their hobby, if they get good reviews at the job, if their family feels loved, if they go to church on Sunday or put in time at the food pantry or whatever, whats the harm?
Yes. That is why you see any American student who can possibly make the entrance requirements and foot the bill going to China, India, Korea, or Saudi Arabia to study. Thats why American and Mexican politicians alike like to start their resume off with a good credential like a degree from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. And why if you go to the math department at a great Russian school you'd better have majored in English because thats what 50% of your classmates will be most comfortable in.
Seriously, while I'm quite prepared to accept that American education is very unexceptional for a first-world country through, say, high-school, the world is beating a path to the door of American universities for a reason. This isn't to say that good schools in, say, the UK or Japan aren't excellent places (they are) or that the very best school in, say, Mexico isn't a great place to be (that would be the aforementioned UNAM, and it probably is) or that there aren't a gazillion problems in higher education (oh, don't even get me started). All these things are true. But regardless, American universities are justifiably the envy of the world.
Working at a Japanese technology incubator makes me wonder whether I should laugh politely at jokes like this or slap my head in frustration (now, for the Insightful mods, thats a fairly obvious head-slap decision). "The Japanese" haven't invested in supple-skinned robots. One research institute invested in supple-skinned robots, and got some press because it makes good copy. Meanwhile, hundreds upon hundreds of laboratories, including one which is one floor below me, have made robots to do industrial work, assist old folks, do disaster recovery, explore the sea floor, provide pet-level companionship, help people with spinal injuries walk again, etc etc etc. Its like saying "You know what Americans invented the Internet for? Duh, porn, who couldn't have seen that coming. Oh well, everyone knew Americans were crazy sex fiends, as we could have easily gathered from a representative survey of American literature like Porky's, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and American Pie." These sort of generalizations contain a bit of truth with a whole lot of stupid. (Side note: stupid makes an excellent noun.)
Then there's always "piratedmovie_highquality_rippebyhaxors.mov.exe". Hey, if it works for exploiting folks through email, it will work for exploiting them through p2p networks, via inattentiveness, long file names which make people ignore the extension, or operating systems which are set to hide known extensions by default.
Penny was nickle and dimed and the buck got quartered.
Because it always hurts like "#%"$#%"#.
This might be a quite radical conception about the hyperlink, but I think that the overwhelming majority of human users are using a browser which shows context around the link so it doesn't matter whether you say click here or link or "I found the most interesting description of how to build a Beowolf cluster of hot grits while I was browsing Slashdot earlier today", the user will be able to know what the link pertains to regardless. The only major group of users who really need that extra reinforcement in the link text are spiders (and, because I should make at least a token effort to recognize that usability is important, folks with clients which have an extremely small "field of vision" whether thats because of their client not being on a traditional PC or because their client is non-visual). Both of these user groups benefit a heck of a lot more from "Mother of the Internet" than they do from "article".
2) Wasted CPU cycles and how you can prevent them.
3) Proper punch card disposal protocols.
The point? We have *no clue* what the computer will look fifty years from now, to say nothing of the security environment. Todays threats will be laughable in light of the technology and practices of tomorrow (many of the threats we spend a lot of time worrying about, such as spyware, are features not of all computing, not even of a particular application class, but that plague one particular implementation of an application which just happens to have a majority share of the market today -- who can say whether a security researcher in 2056 will even remember the words "Internet Explorer" from his history class or whether browsing any analogue to the Internet will be a common activity?). Prognosticating the threat environment that far out is a waste of time. Look to the near term (next 5 years: spam, viruses, malware) and address the perinneals (dumb users, men on the inside, etc) rather than trying to prognosticate what year we'll have the computer equivalent of flying cars.
You're 99% right, with the exception of the part about server-side resources. A "masively massive" server side program which met the other implied constraints (useful for a long time, used by a lot of people, aimed at a very experienced user population) would fit the OSS model like a glove. I'm thinking, say, Apache or MySQL, which can certainly operate in massively massive configurations as well as driving a blog kept on a 3-PC intranet.
I think thats the key to beating the Firewall -- make the attack *scale*. I'm not sure this particular piece of software accomplishes that. Plus, at the very least, dissent online provides a bit of a safety valve. Sure, the Chinese government *could* decide to come down pretty hard on folks trying to access overseas sites... but they already *do* come down very hard on folks trying analagous activities in meatspace. Not that the activities are perfect substitutes for each other, but if you try to meet a group of, say, Falun Gong adherents to have a chitchat about the health benefits of meditation online, its possible you'll get caught. If you try it by trying to track down a Falun Gong practitioner through the grapevine your exposure is orders of magnitude worst (can you guarantee every person who chances to overhear one of your conversations won't go straight to the cops?)
I'd settle for there not being another Counter-Strike which came with "pimp and ho" models and skins on the disk. Its not like somebody said "Whoa, shoot, I just spent the last 6 hours in Maya coding a model and, come to think of it, thats anatomically accurate and it happened to make it onto the gold master." There is just deeply disfunctional management and culture when a $N million dollar project "just so happens" to have boobies on the disk. The gaming companies need to get their own house in order or else they're going to be regulated by external forces with a lot heavier hand then just a simple "keep the pixel porn at home, guys" rule would impose.
... they actually want to make redownloading take a telephone call, which will severely limit the access for it. Otherwise, they'll get somebody, somewhere who buys $3,000 worth of music and then get that account's username and password passed around the internets and before you know it its been "redownloaded" 50,000 times. Sure, they could put some sort of technological limiter on it, but we all know every DRM system gets gamed. Keeping a human in the loop gives a chance to catch the gaming and, at minimum, severely reduces the speed people could game at.
If you've got the stomach to start writing up lots of sentence patterns you can code this sort of thing up in gawk (or perl, if you're concerned about other people reading your code to steal your bright idea) in less than an hour.
Bad java programmer, no twinkie. getProsecutedEntities() will probably return a Collection :)