Yes you are, at least according to a Harvard professors article "why they hate us" and most other well educated people.
Aha, appeal to authority! I see ad hominem isn't the only logical fallacy you know how to use. OBL was clear that he wanted to establish a global caliphate and was willing to use force. I'm not sure why you think a Harvard professor would know more about OBL's motivation than the man himself but if you insult me again perhaps you will convince me.
Using the most common traffic on the internet, porn, for your steganography makes it less likely the NSA will find it even with automation because you are increasing the search space.
NSA is searching porn for steganography whether you are using it or not so you are having no impact on the search space. As far as an automated algorithm is concerned, image data is image data. The content of the image does not change the type of data it is. A jpg is a jpg. If the NSA is really concentrating their efforts at finding steganography on porn it would negate to some extent any advantage in using it.
no, I'm just stating fact, you are a moron.
Ipse-dixitism as well. For someone who considers yourself to be intelligent you really don't seem to be very good at presenting logical argument.
You are misrepresenting the facts of why these people are angry....You don't have a clue why these people are angry. Before you speak at least understand some basic facts, dumb ass.
No I'm not, although you may be speaking of a different set of "these people". Muslims who would otherwise be moderate and peaceable are angry for the reason you state. Hardliners want to kill anyone who doesn't subscribe to their narrow interpretations, including other muslims. OBL and his followers are the hardliner type.
The NSA does have people looking for steganography in internet traffic. It makes their job harder if you hide your messages in the most common types of data flowing across the internet.
I'm pretty sure the NSA knows there is a lot of porn on the net and has no more difficulty examining a pornographic image than any other image. I'm also pretty sure that their process of looking for steganography isn't limited to manually downloading images individually and examining them. You may have heard of automation. The NSA uses it.
You seem to be unable to argue your point without including insults. Interesting.
If you were agnostic about what to use for steganography porn would be obviously the most effective choice. When you are worried about the U.S. govt raiding your home and putting a couple bullets in your head I'm sure you too would be agnostic about what you used for steganography.
If, however, you promote yourself as a fundamentalist muslim leader (or any other anti-porn religious leader) who welcomes the opportunity of glorious martyrdom, willing to kill people for no other reason than they are sinners in the eyes of your religion and it then turns out that when it comes to porn you are agnostic, that's news. Damn disappointing that one has to explain this stuff to slashdot users.
The fact that 25% of search engine requests are for porn is irrelevant since you can still upload and download non-pornographic images without arousing the slightest suspicion that you are using steganography.
Slashdot seems to be overwhelmed by a bunch of bible thumping DOD employees.
And people who can't explain their point without baseless ad hominem attacks. I'm neither promoting the DoD nor saying that porn is bad or religion is good. I do believe that much religious influence in the world would be weakened if the hypocrisy of the leaders is exposed, therefore I welcome this news about a well known religious leader, just as I am glad when catholic abuse is exposed (glad at the exposure, of course, not the abuse) or the hypocritical antics of any other religious leaders comes to light.
I don't care who uses porn. I'd much rather people use porn than commit murder for their religion, for example. However if an influential fundamentalist religious leader is caught with porn they should be ridiculed for it at every opportunity until they are no longer influential.
There are plenty of images that are not porn, enough so that if you are opposed to porn, steganography would not be a motivation at all to use porn. It's not like a non-porn image arouses suspicions. For example, a google image search for "insects" yielded "About 3,930,000 results (0.21 seconds)".
As for the spelling, oops!
I must be strange. I don't give a fuck that bin laden watched porn. I do care that he arranged to have thousands murdered and succeeded in curbing western freedom.
No that's not strange, it's completely normal. There are, however, people in the world who admire him for arranging to have thousands murdered and yet would be likely to hate the idea of him watching porn.
There is good reasons to want him dead, but asking him dead is really different from asking to capture him from the presidential point of view. Asking him dead, is denying him any rights to a trial and judging him a priori.
It's certainly made me decide not to publicly declare war on the US and then claim responsibility when US civilians are killed in terrorist attacks, so as well as denying OBL the right to a trial, it's having a chilling effect on free speech!</sarcasm>
A note about steganography should be prominent on a tech sight like slashdot, just goes to show how how crappy slashdot has gotten.
No, it's because most of us realise that stenography does not require the use of pornographic images, making the possibility of stenography irrelevant to the presence of pornography.
I think ideologically it simply means that the rights of the state supersede that of the individual. So far as an ideal goes, its pretty darn good, in principle.
Until you are the individual whose rights get superseded. It can only sound good to you if it is other people's rights getting superseded but not yours and if you are a selfish arsehole totally lacking in compassion. Unless of course it is only the BAD people whose rights get superseded and they deserve it and it won't affect you because you are one of the GOOD people, in which case it differs little from a theocracy.
Maybe we should be telling our young never to take up arms for any reason. If it was good enough for Christ is it not good enough for all of us?
I suppose if Christ had advocated that no-one ever take up arms then Christians should consider that position authoritative. However:
Luke 22:36 Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.
So it is clear that if you are a Christian, you MUST believe that taking up arms is justified in some situations, else Christ was advocating sin.
I take it you don't actually know real gay people, then. Some of the ones I do have biological children of their own. I suspect it's not all that rare.
Since homosexuals with biological children are clearly able to be sexually aroused by the opposite sex (well, male homosexuals anyway, a lesbian could get pregnant without being aroused, not requiring an erection) then how can their homosexuality be said to be a trait and not a choice?
It seems to me that for some people homosexuality is a choice, while for others it seems to be something they have no control over. For those in the first group, they may have a use for this app.
From TFS: Steve Ballmer got a mention because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact.
What's so hard to understand? When Ballmer started mouthing off about open source it was probably the first time lots of people heard of it. Just because he wasn't influential in the way he would have liked doesn't mean he didn't have an influence. They aren't pretending that he's deliberately helping.
It is a bad thing - an extremely bad thing. There are processes for removing councilors who are doing a bad job, acting illegally or who lose the trust of the people who voted for them.
According to the blog they resigned to "rapturous applause" from the citizens. It was one man blogging, apparently leading to lots of face to face discussions. If they could refute the things being said about them I'm sure they could have done so instead of resigning.
So it would seem that they didn't resign because of one man, they resigned because of what many people found out from one man. It was the many that caused them to resign.
Dedicated GPS units often have a better antenna, but the data coming from the receiver is generally the same no matter what the device. Beyond that, it's all what you do with the data in software.
Don't underestimate the benefit of a better antenna. My phone GPS often lacks the signal strength to connect. Also the screen is a fraction of the size of a stand alone GPS, it doesn't have a touch screen. To enter an address is significantly more difficult than on a TomTom, which is the only other GPS I've used. The GPS connectivity has deteriorated over time, perhaps due to rough treatment of the phone.
I bought this phone as an experiment to see how good the GPS was. My conclusion is that if I want a GPS to buy a stand alone one. Phone GPS has some benefits but if I was relying on having a working GPS, say to find a customers location, it isn't good enough. It has been very handy though compared to not having a GPS unit at all. It's a good feature to have on a phone but it could be used to obtain a sales advantage over a phone that didn't have it, not to make me part with any more money.
Realize this, you will have to cut our quality of life down to equal or _less_ than China's in order to bring our products down to their prices. Is this something you're seriously willing to propose?
What you're willing to propose and what is going to happen are sometimes two completely different things.
OK. Then if you do use encryption, no matter how feeble, it should be constitutionally protected.
As I (not a lawyer) read it, that would be the law as it stands. On a practical level, even if they don't interpret the law that way they still have to come to you to get the encryption keys so it's difficult to do it without your knowledge, unlike snooping unencrypted email.
Face it. The Patriot Act has created an aristocratic society in one fell swoop.
I haven't ever treated telephones as private from government. Just because they need warrants doesn't mean you will know about it if they are listening. If it is possible for them to be listening, assume they could be.
It's good to have legal protections so you can get stuff thrown out of court, but I'm sure they would listen illegally if they had to for many years and just find other ways to "find" the evidence once they knew about it. Your ability to actually secure your communications should take a higher priority for you than a courts ruling on what is admissible evidence.
Even for actual papers a good hiding place is better security than the 4th amendment, and I am in no way denigrating the importance of constitutional protections.
I'm not trolling. I'm curious. What is your proposal. America losing manufacturing is free market at work. China has no labor laws therefore they do things cheaply. We don't. Companies move to China. What can we do to compete with that?
Make sure that when you buy the cheap stuff from China that you are buying productive capacity instead of useless consumer goods. Stuff like power generators. Imports are not bad, wasteful spending is. Better by far to be buying generators than wide screen TV's. For those complaining about how American productivity should be boosted instead of China's, sure China will get paid for this, there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to boost productivity in the US, next time you're buying an electrical item that will be powered with this electricity, make it a CNC lathe or mill, or a development computer or some other piece of productive equipment and produce something instead of an entertainment device so you can consume.
Wake up people, stop complaining about the things that benefit you. Cheaper costs of production boost your economy, not drain it. Your tools, machinery and electricity are cheaper and you think it's a bad thing? WTF?
When you send something via UPS or FedEx, you are giving your parcel to a 3rd party for storage and delivery.
I'm curious how US courts regard postcards. It seems to me that unencrypted email is more similar to a postcard than a package. I don't expect privacy for emails, not because I know how the law in my country treats that issue, but because I send them over a public network in plain text. Even if the law says it's private it still isn't.
A post under TFA: quotes "The constitutional guaranty of the right of the people to be secure in their papers against unreasonable searches and seizures extends to their papers, thus closed against inspection, wherever they may be." (Emphasis mine, I have reached a different conclusion than the poster who highlighted "wherever they may be" instead.
I've found a copy of the passage the quote came from, Ex parte Jackson http://www.altlaw.org/v1/cases/408308
Immediately preceding that is:
In their enforcement, a distinction is to be made between different kinds of mail matter,--between what is intended to be kept free from inspection, such as letters, and sealed packages subject to letter postage; and what is open to inspection, such as newspapers, magazines, pamphlet , and other printed matter, purposely left in a condition to be examined. Letters and sealed packages of this kind in the mail are as fully guarded from examination and inspection, except as to their outward form and weight, as if they were retained by the parties forwarding them in their own domiciles.
It would seem to me that it is not inconsistent if there comes a judgement that email is not under 4th amendment protection and that to answer my own question, postcards probably aren't either.
Since when do the ends justify the means? How do you justify the violation of rights in this non-free market.
Copyright restrictions in themselves are a government intervention. The pay-per-copy software market is not a free market. Whether you think it's good or not I'll leave you to decide, but it's certainly not a free market as the number of suppliers of copies is restricted by government regulations.
JK Rowling's monopoly position on Harry Potter doesn't mean I have to buy it. I can read another author's books without any trouble, even if I'm the only person who does so. This is fundamentally different to software, where I must have compatibility with my bank, government agencies especially tax departments and other business's. If the government starts requiring I buy Harry Potter books to be able to file my taxes I'll object to that too.
I note that there has been no anti-trust action against MS in my country that I'm aware of and yet the MS stranglehold is in many ways broken. Unlike a few years ago you can access most banks without windows, MS supports odf, OOo compatibility is good enough for many people and pdf is suitable for document sharing. The one area that still requires MS is taxation which is the fault of the government not MS. So I would agree that the solution is the market rather than anti-trust law. If government procurement policies mandated open formats and protocols this would have been a complete non-issue. As far as I'm concerned the government has no right to require the use of a particular companies software, it is legal action against the government that is required here, not action against MS.
Even to the extent that any software company has a monopoly they have it because of copyright which is a government intervention in the market anyway. It can be argued that it is a good intervention but it is a government intervention nonetheless.
I'm not sure what this is marketed as, for prototyping? Fast prototypes would be nice. But the vast majority of electronics are mass produced stuff, where the physical cost of the PCB is a small portion of the overall circuitry, with components, labour, and R&D being the real cost. I can't see printing traces of silver being cheaper than the existing methods. Maybe I'm missing something.
The ability of individual operators to perform their own R&D. Such operators could also choose to share their results over the internet licensed for others to modify and distribute under similar terms to the various FOSS licenses. Essentially it is just like every other advance of technology that has put abilities that used to be the sole preserve of companies with big budgets into the hands of the individual.
Personally this is what I see as the potential: that productive capacity will be more in the hands of the individual and small business. Large corporations will always have some functions, but economic power and therefore political power can be distributed more evenly in the population, ie: the middle class. There are always influences centralising power and decentralising power, this can be one of the decentralising influences.
Hardly social activism I would think to speak out about something that is in her own financial interest.
Do people engage in social activism for causes that aren't in their interest (financial or otherwise)? It might be cynical money-grabbing social activism but activist!=altruist. I would say that many social activists have been working directly for their own benefit, for example the black civil rights movement whose members certainly would benefit from equal rights and not being lynched. We don't judge the cause by the benefit they hope for but by whether their it is just and reasonable.
Lily Allen is certainly a social activist on copyright infringement. Those of us who feel that she picked the wrong side of the debate would still feel that way if she did not stand to profit from it. Also consider that many people have never been exposed to a serious argument against copyright or the continual extension of copyright terms etc, the only thing they've seen is the FBI notice and "You wouldn't steal a handbag" clips. Put such a person in an industry where all the people who pay them confirm and add to that propaganda and I think we can safely say that musicians and others who are horrified at the thought of bits being copied are quite genuine even if misguided. They really do believe that teenagers listening to songs without paying will be the end of civilisation as we know it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you are, at least according to a Harvard professors article "why they hate us" and most other well educated people.
Aha, appeal to authority! I see ad hominem isn't the only logical fallacy you know how to use. OBL was clear that he wanted to establish a global caliphate and was willing to use force. I'm not sure why you think a Harvard professor would know more about OBL's motivation than the man himself but if you insult me again perhaps you will convince me.
Using the most common traffic on the internet, porn, for your steganography makes it less likely the NSA will find it even with automation because you are increasing the search space.
NSA is searching porn for steganography whether you are using it or not so you are having no impact on the search space. As far as an automated algorithm is concerned, image data is image data. The content of the image does not change the type of data it is. A jpg is a jpg. If the NSA is really concentrating their efforts at finding steganography on porn it would negate to some extent any advantage in using it.
no, I'm just stating fact, you are a moron.
Ipse-dixitism as well. For someone who considers yourself to be intelligent you really don't seem to be very good at presenting logical argument.
You are misrepresenting the facts of why these people are angry. ...You don't have a clue why these people are angry. Before you speak at least understand some basic facts, dumb ass.
No I'm not, although you may be speaking of a different set of "these people". Muslims who would otherwise be moderate and peaceable are angry for the reason you state. Hardliners want to kill anyone who doesn't subscribe to their narrow interpretations, including other muslims. OBL and his followers are the hardliner type.
The NSA does have people looking for steganography in internet traffic. It makes their job harder if you hide your messages in the most common types of data flowing across the internet.
I'm pretty sure the NSA knows there is a lot of porn on the net and has no more difficulty examining a pornographic image than any other image. I'm also pretty sure that their process of looking for steganography isn't limited to manually downloading images individually and examining them. You may have heard of automation. The NSA uses it.
You seem to be unable to argue your point without including insults. Interesting.
If you were agnostic about what to use for steganography porn would be obviously the most effective choice. When you are worried about the U.S. govt raiding your home and putting a couple bullets in your head I'm sure you too would be agnostic about what you used for steganography.
If, however, you promote yourself as a fundamentalist muslim leader (or any other anti-porn religious leader) who welcomes the opportunity of glorious martyrdom, willing to kill people for no other reason than they are sinners in the eyes of your religion and it then turns out that when it comes to porn you are agnostic, that's news. Damn disappointing that one has to explain this stuff to slashdot users.
The fact that 25% of search engine requests are for porn is irrelevant since you can still upload and download non-pornographic images without arousing the slightest suspicion that you are using steganography.
Slashdot seems to be overwhelmed by a bunch of bible thumping DOD employees.
And people who can't explain their point without baseless ad hominem attacks. I'm neither promoting the DoD nor saying that porn is bad or religion is good. I do believe that much religious influence in the world would be weakened if the hypocrisy of the leaders is exposed, therefore I welcome this news about a well known religious leader, just as I am glad when catholic abuse is exposed (glad at the exposure, of course, not the abuse) or the hypocritical antics of any other religious leaders comes to light.
I don't care who uses porn. I'd much rather people use porn than commit murder for their religion, for example. However if an influential fundamentalist religious leader is caught with porn they should be ridiculed for it at every opportunity until they are no longer influential.
There are plenty of images that are not porn, enough so that if you are opposed to porn, steganography would not be a motivation at all to use porn. It's not like a non-porn image arouses suspicions. For example, a google image search for "insects" yielded "About 3,930,000 results (0.21 seconds)".
As for the spelling, oops!
egregiously aggressive and unscrupulous lawyers.
... as opposed to the other kind of lawyers.
I must be strange. I don't give a fuck that bin laden watched porn. I do care that he arranged to have thousands murdered and succeeded in curbing western freedom.
No that's not strange, it's completely normal. There are, however, people in the world who admire him for arranging to have thousands murdered and yet would be likely to hate the idea of him watching porn.
There is good reasons to want him dead, but asking him dead is really different from asking to capture him from the presidential point of view. Asking him dead, is denying him any rights to a trial and judging him a priori.
It's certainly made me decide not to publicly declare war on the US and then claim responsibility when US civilians are killed in terrorist attacks, so as well as denying OBL the right to a trial, it's having a chilling effect on free speech!</sarcasm>
A note about steganography should be prominent on a tech sight like slashdot, just goes to show how how crappy slashdot has gotten.
No, it's because most of us realise that stenography does not require the use of pornographic images, making the possibility of stenography irrelevant to the presence of pornography.
Reading the Bible, it almost seems like God is obsessed with sex.
God made man in his own image?
/. is the official home of the conspiracy theory
That's just what they want you to think...
I think ideologically it simply means that the rights of the state supersede that of the individual. So far as an ideal goes, its pretty darn good, in principle.
Until you are the individual whose rights get superseded. It can only sound good to you if it is other people's rights getting superseded but not yours and if you are a selfish arsehole totally lacking in compassion. Unless of course it is only the BAD people whose rights get superseded and they deserve it and it won't affect you because you are one of the GOOD people, in which case it differs little from a theocracy.
Maybe we should be telling our young never to take up arms for any reason. If it was good enough for Christ is it not good enough for all of us?
I suppose if Christ had advocated that no-one ever take up arms then Christians should consider that position authoritative. However:
Luke 22:36 Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.
So it is clear that if you are a Christian, you MUST believe that taking up arms is justified in some situations, else Christ was advocating sin.
I take it you don't actually know real gay people, then. Some of the ones I do have biological children of their own. I suspect it's not all that rare.
Since homosexuals with biological children are clearly able to be sexually aroused by the opposite sex (well, male homosexuals anyway, a lesbian could get pregnant without being aroused, not requiring an erection) then how can their homosexuality be said to be a trait and not a choice?
It seems to me that for some people homosexuality is a choice, while for others it seems to be something they have no control over. For those in the first group, they may have a use for this app.
From TFS: Steve Ballmer got a mention because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact.
What's so hard to understand? When Ballmer started mouthing off about open source it was probably the first time lots of people heard of it. Just because he wasn't influential in the way he would have liked doesn't mean he didn't have an influence. They aren't pretending that he's deliberately helping.
It is a bad thing - an extremely bad thing. There are processes for removing councilors who are doing a bad job, acting illegally or who lose the trust of the people who voted for them.
According to the blog they resigned to "rapturous applause" from the citizens. It was one man blogging, apparently leading to lots of face to face discussions. If they could refute the things being said about them I'm sure they could have done so instead of resigning.
So it would seem that they didn't resign because of one man, they resigned because of what many people found out from one man. It was the many that caused them to resign.
Dedicated GPS units often have a better antenna, but the data coming from the receiver is generally the same no matter what the device. Beyond that, it's all what you do with the data in software.
Don't underestimate the benefit of a better antenna. My phone GPS often lacks the signal strength to connect. Also the screen is a fraction of the size of a stand alone GPS, it doesn't have a touch screen. To enter an address is significantly more difficult than on a TomTom, which is the only other GPS I've used. The GPS connectivity has deteriorated over time, perhaps due to rough treatment of the phone.
I bought this phone as an experiment to see how good the GPS was. My conclusion is that if I want a GPS to buy a stand alone one. Phone GPS has some benefits but if I was relying on having a working GPS, say to find a customers location, it isn't good enough. It has been very handy though compared to not having a GPS unit at all. It's a good feature to have on a phone but it could be used to obtain a sales advantage over a phone that didn't have it, not to make me part with any more money.
Realize this, you will have to cut our quality of life down to equal or _less_ than China's in order to bring our products down to their prices. Is this something you're seriously willing to propose?
What you're willing to propose and what is going to happen are sometimes two completely different things.
OK. Then if you do use encryption, no matter how feeble, it should be constitutionally protected.
As I (not a lawyer) read it, that would be the law as it stands. On a practical level, even if they don't interpret the law that way they still have to come to you to get the encryption keys so it's difficult to do it without your knowledge, unlike snooping unencrypted email.
Face it. The Patriot Act has created an aristocratic society in one fell swoop.
I haven't ever treated telephones as private from government. Just because they need warrants doesn't mean you will know about it if they are listening. If it is possible for them to be listening, assume they could be.
It's good to have legal protections so you can get stuff thrown out of court, but I'm sure they would listen illegally if they had to for many years and just find other ways to "find" the evidence once they knew about it. Your ability to actually secure your communications should take a higher priority for you than a courts ruling on what is admissible evidence.
Even for actual papers a good hiding place is better security than the 4th amendment, and I am in no way denigrating the importance of constitutional protections.
I'm not trolling. I'm curious. What is your proposal. America losing manufacturing is free market at work. China has no labor laws therefore they do things cheaply. We don't. Companies move to China. What can we do to compete with that?
Make sure that when you buy the cheap stuff from China that you are buying productive capacity instead of useless consumer goods. Stuff like power generators. Imports are not bad, wasteful spending is. Better by far to be buying generators than wide screen TV's. For those complaining about how American productivity should be boosted instead of China's, sure China will get paid for this, there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to boost productivity in the US, next time you're buying an electrical item that will be powered with this electricity, make it a CNC lathe or mill, or a development computer or some other piece of productive equipment and produce something instead of an entertainment device so you can consume.
Wake up people, stop complaining about the things that benefit you. Cheaper costs of production boost your economy, not drain it. Your tools, machinery and electricity are cheaper and you think it's a bad thing? WTF?
When you send something via UPS or FedEx, you are giving your parcel to a 3rd party for storage and delivery.
I'm curious how US courts regard postcards. It seems to me that unencrypted email is more similar to a postcard than a package. I don't expect privacy for emails, not because I know how the law in my country treats that issue, but because I send them over a public network in plain text. Even if the law says it's private it still isn't.
A post under TFA: quotes "The constitutional guaranty of the right of the people to be secure in their papers against unreasonable searches and seizures extends to their papers, thus closed against inspection, wherever they may be." (Emphasis mine, I have reached a different conclusion than the poster who highlighted "wherever they may be" instead.
I've found a copy of the passage the quote came from, Ex parte Jackson http://www.altlaw.org/v1/cases/408308
Immediately preceding that is:
In their enforcement, a distinction is to be made between different kinds of mail matter,--between what is intended to be kept free from inspection, such as letters, and sealed packages subject to letter postage; and what is open to inspection, such as newspapers, magazines, pamphlet , and other printed matter, purposely left in a condition to be examined. Letters and sealed packages of this kind in the mail are as fully guarded from examination and inspection, except as to their outward form and weight, as if they were retained by the parties forwarding them in their own domiciles.
It would seem to me that it is not inconsistent if there comes a judgement that email is not under 4th amendment protection and that to answer my own question, postcards probably aren't either.
Since when do the ends justify the means? How do you justify the violation of rights in this non-free market.
Copyright restrictions in themselves are a government intervention. The pay-per-copy software market is not a free market. Whether you think it's good or not I'll leave you to decide, but it's certainly not a free market as the number of suppliers of copies is restricted by government regulations.
JK Rowling's monopoly position on Harry Potter doesn't mean I have to buy it. I can read another author's books without any trouble, even if I'm the only person who does so. This is fundamentally different to software, where I must have compatibility with my bank, government agencies especially tax departments and other business's. If the government starts requiring I buy Harry Potter books to be able to file my taxes I'll object to that too.
I note that there has been no anti-trust action against MS in my country that I'm aware of and yet the MS stranglehold is in many ways broken. Unlike a few years ago you can access most banks without windows, MS supports odf, OOo compatibility is good enough for many people and pdf is suitable for document sharing. The one area that still requires MS is taxation which is the fault of the government not MS. So I would agree that the solution is the market rather than anti-trust law. If government procurement policies mandated open formats and protocols this would have been a complete non-issue. As far as I'm concerned the government has no right to require the use of a particular companies software, it is legal action against the government that is required here, not action against MS.
Even to the extent that any software company has a monopoly they have it because of copyright which is a government intervention in the market anyway. It can be argued that it is a good intervention but it is a government intervention nonetheless.
I'm not sure what this is marketed as, for prototyping? Fast prototypes would be nice. But the vast majority of electronics are mass produced stuff, where the physical cost of the PCB is a small portion of the overall circuitry, with components, labour, and R&D being the real cost. I can't see printing traces of silver being cheaper than the existing methods. Maybe I'm missing something.
The ability of individual operators to perform their own R&D. Such operators could also choose to share their results over the internet licensed for others to modify and distribute under similar terms to the various FOSS licenses. Essentially it is just like every other advance of technology that has put abilities that used to be the sole preserve of companies with big budgets into the hands of the individual.
Personally this is what I see as the potential: that productive capacity will be more in the hands of the individual and small business. Large corporations will always have some functions, but economic power and therefore political power can be distributed more evenly in the population, ie: the middle class. There are always influences centralising power and decentralising power, this can be one of the decentralising influences.
what it would change from PCB on demand services where i can order anything for few euros?
The ability to easily design and produce your own in secret.
Hardly social activism I would think to speak out about something that is in her own financial interest.
Do people engage in social activism for causes that aren't in their interest (financial or otherwise)? It might be cynical money-grabbing social activism but activist!=altruist. I would say that many social activists have been working directly for their own benefit, for example the black civil rights movement whose members certainly would benefit from equal rights and not being lynched. We don't judge the cause by the benefit they hope for but by whether their it is just and reasonable.
Lily Allen is certainly a social activist on copyright infringement. Those of us who feel that she picked the wrong side of the debate would still feel that way if she did not stand to profit from it. Also consider that many people have never been exposed to a serious argument against copyright or the continual extension of copyright terms etc, the only thing they've seen is the FBI notice and "You wouldn't steal a handbag" clips. Put such a person in an industry where all the people who pay them confirm and add to that propaganda and I think we can safely say that musicians and others who are horrified at the thought of bits being copied are quite genuine even if misguided. They really do believe that teenagers listening to songs without paying will be the end of civilisation as we know it.