I agree with what you said. I also agree with what I said,:-). Windows is an example where it has, for a good while, been entirely impractical to avoid targetting it due to its ubiquity in the market. That will change, in time. All things do.
Well, the natural step would be to mandate that you cannot drive with temporary plates, or mandate that temporary plates be issued in a form that can be placed where permanent plates go and are easily recognizable by the system.
You could certainly replace the plates, but if the system is tracking all plates in the region, a flag would probably be thrown when one number disappeared and a new number reappeared in the same vicinity. There are ways around any system, of course, but once they have plate recognition it can go pretty far. If they do simple color/model matches in combination with the plates it becomes significantly more difficult to dupe the system.
It seems to me though that what a system like this really does is crack down on the idiots or the unplanned acts of rage scenarios, of which there are no doubt quite a few. It's kind of amazing to see the idiotic things people do when they are caught breaking the law and they panic. I can just see right now all those incredibly dangerous to everybody chases that you see footage of in the news just disappearing. Let the person drive where they want to go and track them. Then when they get out of their vehicle, you have them. That sort of thing.
I'm not much for the whole big brother thing, but if there were an automated system in the US to track all cars on carefully designated roads (most public ones), and checks and balances in place to prevent abuse, I would not be averse to automatic ticket issuance for traffic violations and the use of a system like that to find criminals. I know a lot of people conceptualize dire Orwellian scenarios where big brother gets into everything, but that does not need to happen. Significant time and effort can be taken to ensure legislation that holds enforcement authorities accountable.
Anyone that thinks the government does not already have tremendous power to surveil the general public is smoking something anyway. What keeps us free is the checks and balances in place to curb abuse. Sometimes the checks fail, but mostly they seem to work. Why should this be any different? It can be a beneficial use of emerging technology.
I suppose it is up to our brothers and sisters in GB to tell us if they feel like they are living in 1984. GB seems to be an earlier adopter of these types of measures than we are. What say the British?:-)
Your browser does not talk directly to hardware. It has very limited ability to control devices and that control is provided by the OS. Think about what you are saying. There are a wide variety of services that are provided by the underlying OS that your browser has no ability to do. Your browser does not talk directly to your hard drive, or your graphics card. It leverages the existing windowing environmnent to display information. It communicates with the OS to handle user input.
You just listed 7 reasons why you really do care what OS you run. It is impossible to separate the OS from the factors that you listed. As impossible as separating Internet Explorer from Windows.
Just because an OS has market share and it is lucrative to port to it, does not mean that it is preferable or enjoyable or even in the long-term best interest of the world to support that OS. What if one of your target OS alternatives is proprietary, controlled by a monopolistic company, and is very expensive to license (nevermind support)?
Yes, I really think it does matter which operating system is used, and it should matter to everyone: developers, purchasers, and--unless they are very short-sighted--end users.
You just need one thing: a middle class. In our societies, some have vastly more than others. Insurance and legislation exists to protect that economic position. It's not a society of taking personal responsibility. We have societies of blaming others.
On the flip side, I would say that in Britain the prevalence may have risen with the recession of nobilities as the dominant economic force. Prior to that, a few people had vast power and there was no legislative way for the lower class to attack them. The lower class had little, so there was little value in them quibbling with each other.
In the United States, we initially had a colonial life that was hard and there was not a great economic disparity between people. It did not take long for that to change with the robber barons and the vast wealth of the industrial empires that emerged, and you had the same pattern that had already existing in Britain. But then we went through a similar economic process where the middle class became a dominant economic force with considerable means.
That meant that there was a large pool of people that had less than the very rich and were motivated to seek the wealth of rich people and each other. It also meant that the poor had a huge number of middle income targets to strike at, and thus the rise in prominence of insurance. The truly rich rarely need insurance. If you look at the typical personal settlements that occur in the millions of dollars range, a truly rich person can afford extremely good legal protection and can remunerate without a thought.
Insurance protects the middle class from squabbles with each other and with the poor. These things are interconnected, but at the heart, you need class separation and legal recourse. It is the rise to economic power of the middle class which motivates the creation of mechanisms (insurance and new laws) to do this. I do not think it will ever be otherwise in any society with a middle class that has considerable economic power.
This reminds me of those ad-driven calling programs. Boy, those were popular. I will pay money for a product that does not bombard me with advertising. There is no way I would be willing to use an OS that continually tries to persuade be to buy, buy, buy. It is also like my apartment complex; 95% of my mail is junk mail that the post office puts in there every week because they are paid to do it. I cannot even pay them to not do it, so I went paperless on all my important communication and I check the mailbox once every month or two. That way the post office can wrestle with how to stuff 80 billion advertisements in the mailbox and if they stop delivering to the mailbox, well I win then anyway because I lose none of my important mail and they stop bombarding me with crap.
The thing about ad-driven products is that the ads have to be invasive to an extent that becomes annoying for those of us that know what they want and do not need to be led around like sheep to the products that are of interest. If the ads are not invasive, they will not be effective. So basically, you are inviting a battle for your attention into your own personal life. On one side, there is you trying to do what you care about and enjoy. On the other, these jackasses trying to claim your attention and your wallet.
An OS is such a fundamental part of the computer and most peoples' lives, it just seems insane to invite a daily battle for your time and attention into it.
He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia.
In related news, the United States population is around 300 million and the population of greater Asia is approaching 3 billion--a factor of 10. Whereas, we differ in PhDs by a factor of 5.6.
Current place we have a corporate naming convention document which addresses the various environments that we work with. Formatting conventions are unspecified, so everyone in our group does what they want to do. I typically use an indenting scheme that is pretty standard for most.NET articles that I read or code that I encounter (because much of my work is.NET). For the most part, we just focus on being consistent to our own approaches and the most important thing is being accepting of different ways of doing it.
I think the most important policy is to slap the guy that says, "I like tabs more than spaces" or "I don't like the way you indent" or "I hate the way you put spaces around ('s".
Honestly? These people have too much free time. People use a variety of conventions and I've seen pretty much all of them. As a senior developer, I just take everyone's idiosyncracies in stride, even when they name variables retarded things like: n, vt, pkq, and rsptln.
If I can deduce what they are doing easily, it is no problem. If I cannot, I make them explain it. If they are not around anymore, problem solved. I rewrite or have their stuff rewritten in a good way, since the stuff was 99% likely to be utter crap anyway, and move on without a moments hesitation.
I've worked on a lot of large codebases and I've never encountered this idea of, OMG this code is so archaic that I cannot possibly decipher this person's intent--and believe me, I've worked on some crazy ancient crap. My obligatory developer arrogrance leads me to state that people that cannot figure out code because of coding conventions are weak developers. Anyone that has slogged through the convoluted "efficiency" of Knuth or the a,b,c,i,j,k madness of Wirth can figure shit out.
So anyway, if you have the authority and your people are actually willing to go along with a standard without a huge hullabaloo, then just pick any standard (you'll get way more mileage from just sticking to a consistent convention no matter what it is). If people are going to make a big deal of it and it is difficult to enforce, just deal with it individually and tell people to write sane things. Their coworkers will provide quite good feedback if they are producing shit, and that's where you really need to step into your lead role and work out a resolution.
One of your best tools for a standard is to create automation to enforce it. Get yourself some prettyprint scripts that you have run on all source that is checked in--in fact, get your developers the same tool so they can run it on what they check out to print it the way they like it. (Of course, you only want to check the source in with the standard pretty printing or diffs become atrocious, but that's technical stuff for a different discussion.)
Bottom line is that whatever you can automate in the way of conventions is a win because then it's completely automatic, difficult to bicker about (two coworkers can't very well bicker at each other when it's the prettyprinter's fault, so they can only come to you and you have authority to resolve the issue right quick, whereas they could just engage each other in an endlessly unproductive slugfest if they are coding by the convention of their opinion), and if people want a change it goes through you and you have a strong argument for--"if it isn't broke, don't fix it".
Kind of a ramble, but after many years this is my take on standards. Use a convention if it is convenient. If not, play it a bit more loose, but be firm on snuffing out those annoying neverending debate situations.
That said, one factor that is relevant is the type of work you are doing. I'm assuming from what you said that you have some flexibility to structure as you like. If for instance you were subject to government or other agency auditing (my current company is), then the loose method is not going to fly, but on the other hand, you would probably already know what conventions you needed becaus
Plus our huge trade deficit and dependency on foreign nations for things like--oh, I don't know--OIL, means we already have quite a few foreign interests in our critical path.
Talk about insecure. *chuckle* There are lower hanging fruit our there than the Blackberry.
The problem comes when two forces are in opposition:
The internet is not broken, so don't fix it.
Politicians are broke ("they have less money than God"), so they want to fix it.
Other than money, you have the control motivated by fear arguments. Legislation by fear is retarded. It is like writing code because you think it might be useful. Wtf? Aren't there more than enough things to do that you know damn well will be useful? Do those first.
I guess I'd like to see the pile of letters to congressman, or MP, or whatever representatives the nations that are vying for control are receiving that motivate this need to action--oh, wait a minute--maybe the nations that are up in arms aren't as representational as I have assumed.
Well, I don't see a lot of public outcry from the world about the way the internet is working right now. If anything, you see a lot of people trying to do great things and a few people trying to put everyone in a cell which means the only cell the determined people are going to go to is a terrorist one to fight the establishment that keeps trying to stick it to them.
Wow, that's an erratic train of thought, but there's some useful shit in it.
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
on
Dungeons and Shadows
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· Score: 1
Wrong. I'd give anything to play D&D again.
Apparently you would not. Just give up the wife, kids, and job, and you're back in business!
socialism/communism => the means of production should be not privatly owned but in the hand of the public:
free software => source code (the most important means of production for new software) should be in the hand of the public
I think a better analogy would be: free software is to source code as socialism is to open design in a production environment. I see the production analog as every automobile company makes all design work freely available and then the companies compete on production efficiency (e.g. price, quality, and consumer applicability).
The means of production is hardware. A grain thresher in agriculture, for instance. It would be a little weird to say, "the grain thresher is now freely available to whoever wants to use it" and you would then have conflict because the thresher is a real resource with significant copy costs (making another thresher). Software has virtually no copy cost (and that terrifies several of our favorite monopolies).
The IP in a manufacturing industry (production cost significantly greater than 0) is the design. So I think that is where you need to make your arguments about the good and the bad of it being open. I think it would good, but of course you have to make that argument of "who would innovate if they could not leverage the idea and put a billion dollars in their pocket".
Personally, I think people that say that are stupid. You innovate for a sense of accomplishment, and the wonder of doing something beautiful. You may also innovate for the respect and admiration of your peers. Or maybe you innovate to save millions of lives and make the world a better place.
There are many, many good reasons to innovate in an open design society.
Basic problem is, no "amt" is capable of communicating with any other "amt", not even itself. This results in absurdities like when you want to register a newly born child you need to go to "standesamt", get a marriage-certificate for the parents, then give the same piece of paper back to the same person as a proof that the parents are married. The "Beamte" is prevented by law from trusting himself unless he's first printed the certificate out, handed it to you, and received it back. I could give literally dozens of such absurd examples from first hand accounts after less than half a decade in germany.
My company (U.S. healthcare insurance) is run in a similar way. They are mysteriously successful, however.:-) Don't lose hope!
Security through obscurity is the only answer. All security mechanisms inherently rely upon obscurity, because any system can be cracked. The goal is to make that process so costly that no one will do it. It becomes costly when the solution space is large enough that the cost of testing a particular solution is too high for it to be practical to solve the space. In other words, you obscure the solution to the point that no one can find it with an amount of effort that is practical. The heart of security is obscuring the one thing that people need to know.
You put a pretty basic lock on your door at home and call it done because the cost/reward ratio is such that when you balance the risks of robbery against the possible returns and the difficulty of entering, it is just not worth it for the robber. If the robber could identify more readily which targets would be the most lucrative, then those targets become less obscure, the balance shifts, and theft becomes profitable. The people that get robbed, usually screw up one or more elements of the equation and thus become less obscure: they leave a door clearly unlocked, they comment to the wrong people about an unusual possession, they dress and drive above the average incoming of their neighborhood. And so on.
It is the same in all other security situations. More obviously in key cryptography where you obscure the key in a solution space of numbers, but nonetheless, obscurity is everything where security is concerned.
CoV lasted a week on my hard drive. I played CoH for about 4 months until the repetition drove me to the brink of insanity and I became a villain. At which point the further mind-numbing boredom drove me back to the brink of sanity and into a supersane state of "chuck this boring thing into the nearest landfill where it can do no further harm to humanity".
It is a pretty game with a nice theme, but that is just not enough. Oddly, the day they upgraded CoH with the CoV content, I could no longer run CoH smoothly on my Radeon 9800, and was faced with the choice of upgrading my computer to have a smooth (still mindnumbingly repetitive) play experience.
Granted as a gamer I might drop a couple hundred to bring my computer up to snuff for a game, but not this one.
I think this fellow could have just responded with a note that said, "You can have it for $200,000, or I will join you in court for a lively discussion of trademark law." M$ would likely have just bought it rather than waste money getting it to court. Not sure what the numbers are, but I imagine it would cost M$ more than $200,000, given the high price of their legal team and the time needed to get it on a docket which would impact market timing of the product for which they want the name. And the fellow might even have won, since there is a big difference between "Windows Defender" and "Microsoft Windows Defender". If he did win (why not self-represent for minimal cost and sign it over if you lose), he could offer it to them for $300,000. M$ would certainly want to keep it pretty quiet. It never looks good in the press when they strongarm a kid like this and bad PR costs them money, too.
I guess I wonder if you have a deep enough background to refute the claims of the article and a way that we laymen can understand. To me there is quite a bit of value in seeing some of the more popular quack ideas up here on Slashdot with solid and informed rebuttals that tear the pseudo-scientific article's claims to shreds.
On the other hand, some crazy ideas to turn the establishment upside down as history can attest. I have an undergraduate level education in Physics, but I do not understand Quantum Mechanics at the level necessary to debunk the claims of the article.
Something tells me that a person that entitles their post: "This is fucking embarrassing" in allcaps does not have the needed background either. If anything, I am more disappointed that you rated a 5, Insightful than I am that a Hydrino-oil Salesman's article made it onto Slashdot.
Maybe someday not too far away we might build a space elevator from earth to the moon. It could be like a ginormous game of tetherball. And then...well, I guess we would need a humonginous shuttle shaped like a paddle, too, and it would have to be much more reliable than the current shuttle or...
For me the end result is what concerns me and that is that they get the data. It is true that the sources are often private companies, but the end result is the same. Big brother has a wealth of data on us.
I doubt anyone could successfully argue that our government is unable to find out just about every thing that you do and everything "about you" if they are inclined. It is a scary fact which I think is only made a little better by the fact that there is security in obscurity and most of what we do just fades into the background noise of irrelevancy. But if the eye does catch hold of you, because of a data error or a misidentification or a terror fear frenzy, big brother can figure out "you" to an excruciating level of detail.
The only real question is how easily can they do it for large numbers of people at a time and how openly can they move against a large category of people that a datamine identifies as having a particular undesirable trait in common. There's a lot of safety in a government wanting to "appear" to respect privacy, because they put boundaries around themselves insofar as what they are willing to openly do because of the way those actions would reveal the charade of respect for individual liberty.
I guess what I am saying here is that it isn't really how much information people have about you that is the problem. It's the type of appearance the government is willing to communicate to the populace that is key and whether they can maintain that appearance at a level that they can quell potential rebellious elements of society. An example is that a military state can strip you of more liberties because they have strong military presence in all civilian sectors and thus rebellion requires a greater number of people (so they can do harsher things without inciting enough people to rebel that it would cause a problem).
In the US, public opinion is pretty important because the stated power of the government is mandated by the population and founded on public approval (more or less,:-)). In other words, "The land of the free and the home of the brave." As long as the government wants and needs to uphold that appearance to prevent rebellion on a level that would threaten it, the scope of what they can do with your information is limited.
It's not the information that they have. It's a given that they can get it. People that think our laws prevent the Government from obtaining our information--I do not think those people understand the true power that the Government wields. The real issue is how strongly motivated the government is to not disabuse you of the notion that you have privacy.
If Government starts doing the collecting that will the intial steps towards monitoring of its citizens.
What country do you live in again? Is it the one with the Patriot Act? Or the one with federally mandated agencies that are granted sweeping privileges to protect the state with social, economic, and racial profiling?
How does the information gathered and sold by data brokers differ from the information collected and sold by a private investigator, or is there even a real difference?
You seek out and pay a private investigator a substantial fee to obtain information about one or a small group of individuals.
A data broker seeks you out and offers you similar information about a large group of individuals for a very tiny $/head fee.
Yes, there is a real difference.
Alas, big companies have power and so they try to respect each other and resolve things peacefully (or at least maintain the appearance of this, which usually amounts to the same thing). "You give us $20M and we'll give you $20M worth of advertising through portal XYZ, and then we agree to forget about icky situation ABC." Witness Sun/Microsoft recently. So for big companies in conflict, what you really have is a business opportunity.
Whereas when a big company goes after an individual, the company has a tremendous power advantage (if for no other reason than the individual is usually terrified and does not know how to fight back) and the best resolution for them is to suck as much money out of you as you can afford.
Hence the reason that the only way to fight back is usually to somehow leverage the media to attract a big enough supporter on your side that it is suddenly in the big company's interest to go into "cooperative and constructive" mode.
The evil companies only do what is right when they are forced. For them, "right" is "something that improves my bottom line and that people cannot prevent me from doing".
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with what you said. I also agree with what I said, :-). Windows is an example where it has, for a good while, been entirely impractical to avoid targetting it due to its ubiquity in the market. That will change, in time. All things do.
You could certainly replace the plates, but if the system is tracking all plates in the region, a flag would probably be thrown when one number disappeared and a new number reappeared in the same vicinity. There are ways around any system, of course, but once they have plate recognition it can go pretty far. If they do simple color/model matches in combination with the plates it becomes significantly more difficult to dupe the system.
It seems to me though that what a system like this really does is crack down on the idiots or the unplanned acts of rage scenarios, of which there are no doubt quite a few. It's kind of amazing to see the idiotic things people do when they are caught breaking the law and they panic. I can just see right now all those incredibly dangerous to everybody chases that you see footage of in the news just disappearing. Let the person drive where they want to go and track them. Then when they get out of their vehicle, you have them. That sort of thing.
I'm not much for the whole big brother thing, but if there were an automated system in the US to track all cars on carefully designated roads (most public ones), and checks and balances in place to prevent abuse, I would not be averse to automatic ticket issuance for traffic violations and the use of a system like that to find criminals. I know a lot of people conceptualize dire Orwellian scenarios where big brother gets into everything, but that does not need to happen. Significant time and effort can be taken to ensure legislation that holds enforcement authorities accountable.
Anyone that thinks the government does not already have tremendous power to surveil the general public is smoking something anyway. What keeps us free is the checks and balances in place to curb abuse. Sometimes the checks fail, but mostly they seem to work. Why should this be any different? It can be a beneficial use of emerging technology.
I suppose it is up to our brothers and sisters in GB to tell us if they feel like they are living in 1984. GB seems to be an earlier adopter of these types of measures than we are. What say the British? :-)
Your browser does not talk directly to hardware. It has very limited ability to control devices and that control is provided by the OS. Think about what you are saying. There are a wide variety of services that are provided by the underlying OS that your browser has no ability to do. Your browser does not talk directly to your hard drive, or your graphics card. It leverages the existing windowing environmnent to display information. It communicates with the OS to handle user input.
You just listed 7 reasons why you really do care what OS you run. It is impossible to separate the OS from the factors that you listed. As impossible as separating Internet Explorer from Windows.
Yes, I really think it does matter which operating system is used, and it should matter to everyone: developers, purchasers, and--unless they are very short-sighted--end users.
On the flip side, I would say that in Britain the prevalence may have risen with the recession of nobilities as the dominant economic force. Prior to that, a few people had vast power and there was no legislative way for the lower class to attack them. The lower class had little, so there was little value in them quibbling with each other.
In the United States, we initially had a colonial life that was hard and there was not a great economic disparity between people. It did not take long for that to change with the robber barons and the vast wealth of the industrial empires that emerged, and you had the same pattern that had already existing in Britain. But then we went through a similar economic process where the middle class became a dominant economic force with considerable means.
That meant that there was a large pool of people that had less than the very rich and were motivated to seek the wealth of rich people and each other. It also meant that the poor had a huge number of middle income targets to strike at, and thus the rise in prominence of insurance. The truly rich rarely need insurance. If you look at the typical personal settlements that occur in the millions of dollars range, a truly rich person can afford extremely good legal protection and can remunerate without a thought.
Insurance protects the middle class from squabbles with each other and with the poor. These things are interconnected, but at the heart, you need class separation and legal recourse. It is the rise to economic power of the middle class which motivates the creation of mechanisms (insurance and new laws) to do this. I do not think it will ever be otherwise in any society with a middle class that has considerable economic power.
The thing about ad-driven products is that the ads have to be invasive to an extent that becomes annoying for those of us that know what they want and do not need to be led around like sheep to the products that are of interest. If the ads are not invasive, they will not be effective. So basically, you are inviting a battle for your attention into your own personal life. On one side, there is you trying to do what you care about and enjoy. On the other, these jackasses trying to claim your attention and your wallet.
An OS is such a fundamental part of the computer and most peoples' lives, it just seems insane to invite a daily battle for your time and attention into it.
We are still well ahead of the game.
I think the most important policy is to slap the guy that says, "I like tabs more than spaces" or "I don't like the way you indent" or "I hate the way you put spaces around ('s".
Honestly? These people have too much free time. People use a variety of conventions and I've seen pretty much all of them. As a senior developer, I just take everyone's idiosyncracies in stride, even when they name variables retarded things like: n, vt, pkq, and rsptln.
If I can deduce what they are doing easily, it is no problem. If I cannot, I make them explain it. If they are not around anymore, problem solved. I rewrite or have their stuff rewritten in a good way, since the stuff was 99% likely to be utter crap anyway, and move on without a moments hesitation.
I've worked on a lot of large codebases and I've never encountered this idea of, OMG this code is so archaic that I cannot possibly decipher this person's intent--and believe me, I've worked on some crazy ancient crap. My obligatory developer arrogrance leads me to state that people that cannot figure out code because of coding conventions are weak developers. Anyone that has slogged through the convoluted "efficiency" of Knuth or the a,b,c,i,j,k madness of Wirth can figure shit out.
So anyway, if you have the authority and your people are actually willing to go along with a standard without a huge hullabaloo, then just pick any standard (you'll get way more mileage from just sticking to a consistent convention no matter what it is). If people are going to make a big deal of it and it is difficult to enforce, just deal with it individually and tell people to write sane things. Their coworkers will provide quite good feedback if they are producing shit, and that's where you really need to step into your lead role and work out a resolution.
One of your best tools for a standard is to create automation to enforce it. Get yourself some prettyprint scripts that you have run on all source that is checked in--in fact, get your developers the same tool so they can run it on what they check out to print it the way they like it. (Of course, you only want to check the source in with the standard pretty printing or diffs become atrocious, but that's technical stuff for a different discussion.)
Bottom line is that whatever you can automate in the way of conventions is a win because then it's completely automatic, difficult to bicker about (two coworkers can't very well bicker at each other when it's the prettyprinter's fault, so they can only come to you and you have authority to resolve the issue right quick, whereas they could just engage each other in an endlessly unproductive slugfest if they are coding by the convention of their opinion), and if people want a change it goes through you and you have a strong argument for--"if it isn't broke, don't fix it".
Kind of a ramble, but after many years this is my take on standards. Use a convention if it is convenient. If not, play it a bit more loose, but be firm on snuffing out those annoying neverending debate situations.
That said, one factor that is relevant is the type of work you are doing. I'm assuming from what you said that you have some flexibility to structure as you like. If for instance you were subject to government or other agency auditing (my current company is), then the loose method is not going to fly, but on the other hand, you would probably already know what conventions you needed becaus
Talk about insecure. *chuckle* There are lower hanging fruit our there than the Blackberry.
Other than money, you have the control motivated by fear arguments. Legislation by fear is retarded. It is like writing code because you think it might be useful. Wtf? Aren't there more than enough things to do that you know damn well will be useful? Do those first.
I guess I'd like to see the pile of letters to congressman, or MP, or whatever representatives the nations that are vying for control are receiving that motivate this need to action--oh, wait a minute--maybe the nations that are up in arms aren't as representational as I have assumed.
Well, I don't see a lot of public outcry from the world about the way the internet is working right now. If anything, you see a lot of people trying to do great things and a few people trying to put everyone in a cell which means the only cell the determined people are going to go to is a terrorist one to fight the establishment that keeps trying to stick it to them.
Wow, that's an erratic train of thought, but there's some useful shit in it.
The problem is that most people only read half of the words in every sentence. Not that this is a problem for them.
I think a better analogy would be: free software is to source code as socialism is to open design in a production environment. I see the production analog as every automobile company makes all design work freely available and then the companies compete on production efficiency (e.g. price, quality, and consumer applicability).
The means of production is hardware. A grain thresher in agriculture, for instance. It would be a little weird to say, "the grain thresher is now freely available to whoever wants to use it" and you would then have conflict because the thresher is a real resource with significant copy costs (making another thresher). Software has virtually no copy cost (and that terrifies several of our favorite monopolies).
The IP in a manufacturing industry (production cost significantly greater than 0) is the design. So I think that is where you need to make your arguments about the good and the bad of it being open. I think it would good, but of course you have to make that argument of "who would innovate if they could not leverage the idea and put a billion dollars in their pocket".
Personally, I think people that say that are stupid. You innovate for a sense of accomplishment, and the wonder of doing something beautiful. You may also innovate for the respect and admiration of your peers. Or maybe you innovate to save millions of lives and make the world a better place.
There are many, many good reasons to innovate in an open design society.
You put a pretty basic lock on your door at home and call it done because the cost/reward ratio is such that when you balance the risks of robbery against the possible returns and the difficulty of entering, it is just not worth it for the robber. If the robber could identify more readily which targets would be the most lucrative, then those targets become less obscure, the balance shifts, and theft becomes profitable. The people that get robbed, usually screw up one or more elements of the equation and thus become less obscure: they leave a door clearly unlocked, they comment to the wrong people about an unusual possession, they dress and drive above the average incoming of their neighborhood. And so on.
It is the same in all other security situations. More obviously in key cryptography where you obscure the key in a solution space of numbers, but nonetheless, obscurity is everything where security is concerned.
It is a pretty game with a nice theme, but that is just not enough. Oddly, the day they upgraded CoH with the CoV content, I could no longer run CoH smoothly on my Radeon 9800, and was faced with the choice of upgrading my computer to have a smooth (still mindnumbingly repetitive) play experience.
Granted as a gamer I might drop a couple hundred to bring my computer up to snuff for a game, but not this one.
Lost opportunity.
On the other hand, some crazy ideas to turn the establishment upside down as history can attest. I have an undergraduate level education in Physics, but I do not understand Quantum Mechanics at the level necessary to debunk the claims of the article.
Something tells me that a person that entitles their post: "This is fucking embarrassing" in allcaps does not have the needed background either. If anything, I am more disappointed that you rated a 5, Insightful than I am that a Hydrino-oil Salesman's article made it onto Slashdot.
Whoosh---------Whoosh-----Whoosh---Whoosh--Whoosh- -Whoo-Whoo-Who-Wh-W-CRUNCH.
On the bright side, transport costs from earth to moon would then go way down...
I doubt anyone could successfully argue that our government is unable to find out just about every thing that you do and everything "about you" if they are inclined. It is a scary fact which I think is only made a little better by the fact that there is security in obscurity and most of what we do just fades into the background noise of irrelevancy. But if the eye does catch hold of you, because of a data error or a misidentification or a terror fear frenzy, big brother can figure out "you" to an excruciating level of detail.
The only real question is how easily can they do it for large numbers of people at a time and how openly can they move against a large category of people that a datamine identifies as having a particular undesirable trait in common. There's a lot of safety in a government wanting to "appear" to respect privacy, because they put boundaries around themselves insofar as what they are willing to openly do because of the way those actions would reveal the charade of respect for individual liberty.
I guess what I am saying here is that it isn't really how much information people have about you that is the problem. It's the type of appearance the government is willing to communicate to the populace that is key and whether they can maintain that appearance at a level that they can quell potential rebellious elements of society. An example is that a military state can strip you of more liberties because they have strong military presence in all civilian sectors and thus rebellion requires a greater number of people (so they can do harsher things without inciting enough people to rebel that it would cause a problem).
In the US, public opinion is pretty important because the stated power of the government is mandated by the population and founded on public approval (more or less, :-)). In other words, "The land of the free and the home of the brave." As long as the government wants and needs to uphold that appearance to prevent rebellion on a level that would threaten it, the scope of what they can do with your information is limited.
It's not the information that they have. It's a given that they can get it. People that think our laws prevent the Government from obtaining our information--I do not think those people understand the true power that the Government wields. The real issue is how strongly motivated the government is to not disabuse you of the notion that you have privacy.
Alas, big companies have power and so they try to respect each other and resolve things peacefully (or at least maintain the appearance of this, which usually amounts to the same thing). "You give us $20M and we'll give you $20M worth of advertising through portal XYZ, and then we agree to forget about icky situation ABC." Witness Sun/Microsoft recently. So for big companies in conflict, what you really have is a business opportunity. Whereas when a big company goes after an individual, the company has a tremendous power advantage (if for no other reason than the individual is usually terrified and does not know how to fight back) and the best resolution for them is to suck as much money out of you as you can afford. Hence the reason that the only way to fight back is usually to somehow leverage the media to attract a big enough supporter on your side that it is suddenly in the big company's interest to go into "cooperative and constructive" mode. The evil companies only do what is right when they are forced. For them, "right" is "something that improves my bottom line and that people cannot prevent me from doing".