EVDO, i.e. Verizon Broadband Wireless 300-500kbps sustained, is an affordable $80/month for unlimited use. But the only hardware supported is a PCMCIA card!
In an online telecom news site -- can't find the link that I've posted before because Slashdot limits my ability to read my past posts -- a Nokia official stated that they chose to not make any cellphone EVDO compatible because they saw no market for it since the "DO" stands for "data only" and the poor users would have to switch between web browsing and talking on the phone.
I've been waiting for two years for high speed cell phone web browsing, and I blame Nokia, not small screen size!
Grew up with CD's and LaserDiscs, can't accept DRM
on
When Would You Accept DRM?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Prior to 1980, it was expected that when you went to a movie you might not be able to ever see it again. And it was expected that your records would get more and more scratchy and skippy with age, and maybe even break.
Not me. My teenage years were in the 1980's, where I was able to purchase -- legally -- "perfect" quality CDs and high quality (for NTSC, anyway) LaserDiscs, both free of copy protection. Both CDs and LaserDiscs were touted to last a lifetime, and even though that's not true, the lack of copy protection enabled lifetime chain copying to preserve the recording for personal use.
I grew up accustomed to, after hearing or seeing something I liked, purchasing it, and playing it back at any time for one of two purposes: a) reflecting upon its content, b) recalling the time and place where I originally heard or saw the recording, for the purposes of sentimentality.
I've said it many times, and almost always get modded down, but I'll say it again. I consider it a form of mind control for a publisher to present something for my consumption, and then be able to at a later date forbid me from reviewing that material in the time, place, and manner of my choosing.
As I said, I believe this attitude of mine is due in part to my Gen X demographic. Baby boomers and older -- those presumably running XXAA -- grew up not expecting reviewing capability. Baby boomlets grew up expecting stuff for free via P2P. Gen X'ers are in the position of expecting lifetime reviewing capability, and expecting to pay a reasonable one-time fee for it.
But demographically, there aren't as many Gen X'ers as baby boomers and baby boomlets. And no one seems to care that books after 1924 are rotting away. So DRM and short memories it will be from now on.
Yes, e-scrabble violates Hasbro's trademark. Fine. e-scrabble should have chosen a different domain name. But the board (with "double score", etc.) is copyrighted. However, Scrabble was invented in 1948, and with the copyright law in force at that time, would have been copyrighted for 56 years (ending in 2004) were it not for the retroactive Copyright Law of 1976.
It is these retroactive copyright laws that Eldred was arguing to the Supreme Court created perpetual copyrights, in variance with the U.S. Constitution that called for a "limited time".
Religious oppression -- and even the tacit condoning of it -- is offensive. Stating an opinion about a religion in a land that still retains religious freedom (the U.S.-centric Slashdot:-) is not offensive.
It all depends on whether you view the preborn as a repressed people. I predict that someday we will wonder how we ever considered them to be non-human, much as we wonder today how we ever considered African slaves to be non-human (this analogy comes from Alan Keyes).
Just because someone looks a little different is no reason to kill them.
Egyptians were among the first Christians. Tradition is that they were evangelized by St. Mark the Apostle. Then several centuries later Islam was invented, and the Arabs almost immediately conquered Egypt as the Roman Empire was crumbling, and in the process started to replace the Coptic language (a derivation of hieroglyphics) with Arabic, the language of the Koran.
Saying that Egyptians just decided to "give up" Coptic and start speaking Arabic is as offensive as saying that Native Americans "gave up" their lands and languages and "decided" to start speaking English.
Democracy Now! makes its entire shows available in MP3 and OGG. It's about the most informative show out there. It's liberal-libertarian and is regrettably pro-choice, but mostly deals with issues about oppressed people from around the world. Domestic issues are generally limited to libertarian issues such as privacy, analysis of the mainstream media, etc., and to liberal issues such as race relations.
Feds are using their new powers in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism--something most members of Congress never anticipated.
Plus, the GWU professor is only looking at reports to the DOJ. Recall for the most maligned provision of the Patriot Act, that of peeking at library records, librarians are sworn to secrecy and so the victims do not currently know of their loss of privacy. (They may find out after the next terrorist attack and they get rounded up into the baseball stadium with concertina wire.)
As I've posted often here, I would pay $2 to $3 per song (the inflation adjusted equivalent of 45's c. 1980) provided it was without DRM. But you'd have to pay me at least $20 to listen to a good song that I would never be able to purchase and be able to listen to for the rest of my life.
Songs trigger memories, and songs are memories. I'm not willing to let corporations control my memories.
So CNN is jumping on the bandwagon of scaring bloggers. The Washington Post did it last month. See the latest in my "media desperately trying to ignore bloggers" series, Wash Post desperately trying to scare bloggers. Actually, we can see that the mainstream media has now progressed from the ignore phase to the badmouth phase (analogous to Microsoft's behavior toward Linux).
Regardless that the risk of losing a job is real, the CNN and Washington Post stories fail to mention the benefits to society of news blogs like mine that highlight the relevance of buried stories, and even break stories from time to time.
The press is supposed to be acting as the unofficial fourth branch of the U.S. government, to keep the other three in check. This is eloquently summarized in a 2002 6th Circuit Court decision:
In our democracy, based on checks and balances, neither the Bill of Rights nor the judiciary can second-guess government's choices. The only safeguard on this extraordinary governmental power is the public, deputizing the press as the guardians of their liberty.(1) "An informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment[.]"
Grosjean v. Am. Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, 250 (1936). "[They] alone can here protect the values of democratic government." New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713, 728 (1971) (per curiam) (Stewart, J., concurring).
[...] [Footnote 1] A draft of the First Amendment specifically referred to the press as "one of the great bulwarks of liberty." New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713, 716 (1971) (per curiam) (Black, J., concurring).
If the mainstream media were doing its job to serve society, it would picking up the stories from blogs rather than trying to scare bloggers. The bloggers are the ones on the front lines defending democracy, not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is interested only in defending its bottom line. (Which actually -- at least for those that are publicly traded -- they are required by law to do. How did we end up with such laws that strike at the heart of the First Amendment?)
The mainstream media is scared. After the tenth anniversary of Yahoo!, they haven't figured out yet what to do with the Internet. In a desperate bid, the Washington Post just bought Slate -- a marriage as divine as AOL/Time Warner. Here are two quick suggestions for any mainstream media moguls who happen to be reading this:
Provide deep links to primary source documents like the bloggers do (court decisions, legislative bills, corporate press releases, etc.)
Allow the readership to vote stories up to the front page. (Advanced: provide for affinity groups, in the manner of Amazon.)
It's not that simple, of course. The mainstream media is afraid of losing access to information sources who also happen to be subjects of news stories from time to time -- e.g., the White House. There is also probably a bit of old-fashioned snobbery, that they're here to tell us the news, not to give us primary sources nor to let us participate in editorial decisions.
The first mainstream media outlet that can leverage its brand, overcome these hurdles, and embrace the nature of the Internet (namely, linking and collaboration) stands to make a financial killing while simultaneously living up to their charge by the founding fathers of being our "guardian of liberty."
MS-DOS is just a Disk Operating System. The Atari 800 OS, in contrast, provided things like a screen editor (also made available as an I/O device that you could dump to), predefined graphics modes (i.e. given the high-level command, "give me mode 7 (160x96)," set up all the hardware registers and a memory map), and floating point math routines. The Atari DOS was separate from its OS. One might say that the Atari ROM OS is analogous to the PC ROM BIOS, but as described, the Atari OS went way beyond "basic input/output".
Simple answer: if you're too busy to do it for free, and you don't want to take your friends' and family's money, then ask your friends and family to pay (by the hour) some buddy of yours that's unemployed -- even, or especially, if your buddy doesn't have a business started yet. They could be the first clients.
We're so generous. We destroy indigenous cultures with Hollywood and advertising, luring them to the more "advanced" Western lifestyle. Then we say that it costs money, and, oh, here's a way to earn that money.
Selling technology-laden products is not liberating, but technology training would be.
There are several intriguing aspects of the Shroud that aren't well-known to those who haven't investigated it:
The image is like an X-ray projection as opposed to just a surface image. I.e., a hypothesis that satisfies this is if the Shroud fell straight through the body of Jesus. (This is why Mel Gibson portrayed it that way in his movie.)
The discolorations of the fibers that form the image penetrate the fibers only to a shallow amount. Moreover, the fibers are penetrated both on the top and the bottom, with the middles of the fibers untouched. This "second image" on the back-side (to which researchers have had limited access to until recently) that was reported last spring (see New image found on back of Shroud of Turin: Reported around the world except U.S.) corroborates the hypothesis above. To explain this, various scientists have suggested a "corona discharge" or "thermo-nuclear reaction", which is why Mel Gibson added that visual element to his movie.
The 1988 carbon dating has been debunked for a long time; this is not news.
Various Popes personally believe it to be authentic, but could never speak infallibly on the issue as Popes cannot speak infallibly about particulars, only the universals of faith and morals.
Besides my blog article linked above, a good overview of post-1988 Shroud developments is Fr. Saunder's four-part series in the Arlington (Virginia) Catholic Herald: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
In case you're unfamiliar with the famous story of the sisters Martha and Mary (not related to any famous Martha or Mary elsewhere in the Bible), it's in Luke 10:39-42. Essentially, it's better to pray than to be obsessed with the world.
We'll spend money on investigating a dirty old piece of cloth but we're not prepared to stop all the prejudices and greed-fuelled, self-interested warmongers in the world.
You mean warmongers like Bush? Bush is our Caesar, and Jesus taught obedience to Caesar (see Matthew 22:15-22). As a Christian, I blog about the evils of Bush, not because I expect to rid the world of madmen, but to help my readers to form their consciences as to what is right and wrong. (OK, that's just my excuse. The real reason is the same as for other bloggers -- catharsis. Writing underreported.com forces me to check my facts and helps me remember them for potential in-person conversations.)
The point is that you're coming down on the "feed the poor" side of the perpetual "build cathedrals vs. feed the poor" debate. The Catholic Church has obviously done both through the millenia, but not without a lot of deliberate focus on the cathedral building amidst the din of the feeders of the poor. The Shroud of Turn, even if a fake, is a source of inspiration for meditative prayer.
Am I the only one who misses the analog paddle controller and the eight-direction human-sized joystick (as opposed to the phallic flight-sim monstrosities)?
And please, those retro VCS game-in-a-joysticks -- why bastardize classics like Circus Atari and Kaboom! with a joystick rather than an analog positioner?
Seriously, though, I do think we will see more games in the future that sense body position and movement -- more than just Dance Dance Revolution. However, as TV did not completely replace radio, neither will whole body VR dislodge recidivist couch potatoes from their handheld controllers (or perhaps in the future mind-reading or simply eye-tracking controllers -- that way they can succumb to an obese stasis).
According to a July Slashdot story, DNS updates should now take five minutes.
I've always worried about either terrorists or the FBI conducting an attack on the populace where a component of that attack was causing mass confusion and disturbing communication (e-mail and blogs) via a DNS takeover.
DNS is a weak point. Sure, "only" 99% of Internet users rely on one of the main DNS servers, and, sure, like all censorship on the Internet, the Internet will route around it. But confusing/misinforming 99% of the people for an hour, or at least several minutes, would be enough for some purposes.
Chevrolet marketed the Corvette not for profit, but rather so that Camero purchasers would feel like they were getting a Corvette-lite.
Airbus will be able to claim the Corvette for the next quarter-century. Boeing is right when they say the market is not there for ferrying 600 passengers at a time -- that passengers prefer point-to-point flights rather than hub-to-hub. But the market exists, and Boeing is neglecting to mention the growing market for overnight cargo. FedEx is the A380's biggest champion.
But the market is not big enough for two players. Since the A380's announcement, Boeing has been flirting with 747 mods, such as this one that turns the currently unused rear attic into private but windowless sleeping cabins. But Boeing couldn't generate sufficient interest (i.e. firm pre-orders).
Boeing will be left to pursue the unglamorous but profitable mid-size and long-distance markets. E.g., the 777-200ER will combine 300-440 capacity with one of the longest reaches available, possibly enabling Europe<->Australia routes for the first time.
The next big glamour will be the Concorde replacement. Currently, the thought is that supersonic travel can never be made economical enough; that customers would rather bask in luxury aboard an air-yacht like the A380 than pay the price for an unsubsidized supersonic airplane. And given the technical hurdles of the sonic boom (which I think can be solved, but not for the next 30 years), supersonic travel would be limited to only over oceans, which is counter to the current point-to-point market demand.
Given that Boeing recently backed out of supersonic research, it'll be a good long while before it can reclaim the glory crown from Airbus. For 35 years, Boeing held the crown with the 747, inspiration of countless Hollywood movies. Now it's Airbus' turn for the next few decades.
Boeing will continue to be profitable, but without the glory.
What could the motive for trying to insert religious teachings into our public institutions be, other than an attempt to theocracize our society, and to marginalize minority religions?
And what could the motive for trying to eliminate religious teachings from schools, other than an attempt to secularize our society, and to marginalize all religions?
Such large sums of money should not be confiscated upon threat of jail for such purposes.
You ask what this changes. My answer is the balance of power between the government and the people.
(And, really, it's just an extension of traffic cameras, which are equally objectionable to GPS-without-a-warrant.)
Mechanized tracking of the public is not police doing their job. It's police delegating their job to machines. If something is serious enough to track, it should be serious enough to assign a human being -- or at the very least, require a judge to authorize mechanized tracking. If we drop that requirement, then we end up with excess surveillance of the public.
And what's wrong with that? The potential for abuse by a government. We've already seen examples of Clinton and Bush deploying the IRS against its political enemies. Complete surveillance of anyone would be another taxpayer-funded tool of the incumbant to perpetuate his/her personal or party rule. Knowledge is power. If you know your political enemy is cheating on his/her spouse through surveillance logs, that political enemy is instantly destroyed. All it takes is an anonymous call to a tabloid -- no official announcement from the government surveillance agency is necessary.
In general, knowledge through surveillance enables control. Knowing every last detail of a political enemy allows an exploiter to innocuously apply martial arts-style precise pressure to make the enemy's life fall like a house of cards -- for example, slashing the tires on the enemy's car on the day of a critical secret meeting.
The difference between human tracking and machine tracking is the difference between manuscript-copying and the printing press, or between the printing press and the Internet, i.e., qualitative. As Douglas Engelbart has described this phenomenon:
The more I studied, the more it became clear that you make a small change in the size and it just often times makes a noticeable quantitative change. But, pretty soon the change gets large enough that you're going to get qualitative changes.
Mechanized surveillance takes traditional surveillance to a new level, and puts too much power in the hands of the government to be used against those opposed to the government's policies. Government should be for the people, not control of the people through mechanized knowledge collection.
OK, I went to craigslist for the first time. Maybe I'm a stick-in-the-mud, but is it any different than the local UseNet hierarchies? Is the only reason that craigslist is so popular because of the general reasons that other web-based technologies (e.g. Yahoo! Groups) are more popular now than NNTP? (No storage requirement for lazy ISPs, no additional reader software required, etc.)
If so, that would have made a nice concise description of what craigslist is. Or is UseNet so old no one knows or cares about it anymore?
Slashdot Mirror
In an online telecom news site -- can't find the link that I've posted before because Slashdot limits my ability to read my past posts -- a Nokia official stated that they chose to not make any cellphone EVDO compatible because they saw no market for it since the "DO" stands for "data only" and the poor users would have to switch between web browsing and talking on the phone.
I've been waiting for two years for high speed cell phone web browsing, and I blame Nokia, not small screen size!
Not me. My teenage years were in the 1980's, where I was able to purchase -- legally -- "perfect" quality CDs and high quality (for NTSC, anyway) LaserDiscs, both free of copy protection. Both CDs and LaserDiscs were touted to last a lifetime, and even though that's not true, the lack of copy protection enabled lifetime chain copying to preserve the recording for personal use.
I grew up accustomed to, after hearing or seeing something I liked, purchasing it, and playing it back at any time for one of two purposes: a) reflecting upon its content, b) recalling the time and place where I originally heard or saw the recording, for the purposes of sentimentality.
I've said it many times, and almost always get modded down, but I'll say it again. I consider it a form of mind control for a publisher to present something for my consumption, and then be able to at a later date forbid me from reviewing that material in the time, place, and manner of my choosing.
As I said, I believe this attitude of mine is due in part to my Gen X demographic. Baby boomers and older -- those presumably running XXAA -- grew up not expecting reviewing capability. Baby boomlets grew up expecting stuff for free via P2P. Gen X'ers are in the position of expecting lifetime reviewing capability, and expecting to pay a reasonable one-time fee for it.
But demographically, there aren't as many Gen X'ers as baby boomers and baby boomlets. And no one seems to care that books after 1924 are rotting away. So DRM and short memories it will be from now on.
It is these retroactive copyright laws that Eldred was arguing to the Supreme Court created perpetual copyrights, in variance with the U.S. Constitution that called for a "limited time".
I should have also highlighted that the oppression continues to this day. See my blog story Egyptian pro-Christian pro-democracy activist sentenced to 7 years -- page 15 of Wash Post.
Just because someone looks a little different is no reason to kill them.
Saying that Egyptians just decided to "give up" Coptic and start speaking Arabic is as offensive as saying that Native Americans "gave up" their lands and languages and "decided" to start speaking English.
For a history, see copts.net.
Democracy Now! makes its entire shows available in MP3 and OGG. It's about the most informative show out there. It's liberal-libertarian and is regrettably pro-choice, but mostly deals with issues about oppressed people from around the world. Domestic issues are generally limited to libertarian issues such as privacy, analysis of the mainstream media, etc., and to liberal issues such as race relations.
Songs trigger memories, and songs are memories. I'm not willing to let corporations control my memories.
Regardless that the risk of losing a job is real, the CNN and Washington Post stories fail to mention the benefits to society of news blogs like mine that highlight the relevance of buried stories, and even break stories from time to time.
The press is supposed to be acting as the unofficial fourth branch of the U.S. government, to keep the other three in check. This is eloquently summarized in a 2002 6th Circuit Court decision:
If the mainstream media were doing its job to serve society, it would picking up the stories from blogs rather than trying to scare bloggers. The bloggers are the ones on the front lines defending democracy, not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is interested only in defending its bottom line. (Which actually -- at least for those that are publicly traded -- they are required by law to do. How did we end up with such laws that strike at the heart of the First Amendment?)The mainstream media is scared. After the tenth anniversary of Yahoo!, they haven't figured out yet what to do with the Internet. In a desperate bid, the Washington Post just bought Slate -- a marriage as divine as AOL/Time Warner. Here are two quick suggestions for any mainstream media moguls who happen to be reading this:
- Provide deep links to primary source documents like the bloggers do (court decisions, legislative bills, corporate press releases, etc.)
- Allow the readership to vote stories up to the front page. (Advanced: provide for affinity groups, in the manner of Amazon.)
It's not that simple, of course. The mainstream media is afraid of losing access to information sources who also happen to be subjects of news stories from time to time -- e.g., the White House. There is also probably a bit of old-fashioned snobbery, that they're here to tell us the news, not to give us primary sources nor to let us participate in editorial decisions.The first mainstream media outlet that can leverage its brand, overcome these hurdles, and embrace the nature of the Internet (namely, linking and collaboration) stands to make a financial killing while simultaneously living up to their charge by the founding fathers of being our "guardian of liberty."
MS-DOS is just a Disk Operating System. The Atari 800 OS, in contrast, provided things like a screen editor (also made available as an I/O device that you could dump to), predefined graphics modes (i.e. given the high-level command, "give me mode 7 (160x96)," set up all the hardware registers and a memory map), and floating point math routines. The Atari DOS was separate from its OS. One might say that the Atari ROM OS is analogous to the PC ROM BIOS, but as described, the Atari OS went way beyond "basic input/output".
Simple answer: if you're too busy to do it for free, and you don't want to take your friends' and family's money, then ask your friends and family to pay (by the hour) some buddy of yours that's unemployed -- even, or especially, if your buddy doesn't have a business started yet. They could be the first clients.
Selling technology-laden products is not liberating, but technology training would be.
- The image is like an X-ray projection as opposed to just a surface image. I.e., a hypothesis that satisfies this is if the Shroud fell straight through the body of Jesus. (This is why Mel Gibson portrayed it that way in his movie.)
- The discolorations of the fibers that form the image penetrate the fibers only to a shallow amount. Moreover, the fibers are penetrated both on the top and the bottom, with the middles of the fibers untouched. This "second image" on the back-side (to which researchers have had limited access to until recently) that was reported last spring (see New image found on back of Shroud of Turin: Reported around the world except U.S.) corroborates the hypothesis above. To explain this, various scientists have suggested a "corona discharge" or "thermo-nuclear reaction", which is why Mel Gibson added that visual element to his movie.
- The 1988 carbon dating has been debunked for a long time; this is not news.
- Various Popes personally believe it to be authentic, but could never speak infallibly on the issue as Popes cannot speak infallibly about particulars, only the universals of faith and morals.
Besides my blog article linked above, a good overview of post-1988 Shroud developments is Fr. Saunder's four-part series in the Arlington (Virginia) Catholic Herald: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.The point is that you're coming down on the "feed the poor" side of the perpetual "build cathedrals vs. feed the poor" debate. The Catholic Church has obviously done both through the millenia, but not without a lot of deliberate focus on the cathedral building amidst the din of the feeders of the poor. The Shroud of Turn, even if a fake, is a source of inspiration for meditative prayer.
And please, those retro VCS game-in-a-joysticks -- why bastardize classics like Circus Atari and Kaboom! with a joystick rather than an analog positioner?
Seriously, though, I do think we will see more games in the future that sense body position and movement -- more than just Dance Dance Revolution. However, as TV did not completely replace radio, neither will whole body VR dislodge recidivist couch potatoes from their handheld controllers (or perhaps in the future mind-reading or simply eye-tracking controllers -- that way they can succumb to an obese stasis).
I've always worried about either terrorists or the FBI conducting an attack on the populace where a component of that attack was causing mass confusion and disturbing communication (e-mail and blogs) via a DNS takeover.
DNS is a weak point. Sure, "only" 99% of Internet users rely on one of the main DNS servers, and, sure, like all censorship on the Internet, the Internet will route around it. But confusing/misinforming 99% of the people for an hour, or at least several minutes, would be enough for some purposes.
I thought that was a c. 1990 Intel technology.
Airbus will be able to claim the Corvette for the next quarter-century. Boeing is right when they say the market is not there for ferrying 600 passengers at a time -- that passengers prefer point-to-point flights rather than hub-to-hub. But the market exists, and Boeing is neglecting to mention the growing market for overnight cargo. FedEx is the A380's biggest champion.
But the market is not big enough for two players. Since the A380's announcement, Boeing has been flirting with 747 mods, such as this one that turns the currently unused rear attic into private but windowless sleeping cabins. But Boeing couldn't generate sufficient interest (i.e. firm pre-orders).
Boeing will be left to pursue the unglamorous but profitable mid-size and long-distance markets. E.g., the 777-200ER will combine 300-440 capacity with one of the longest reaches available, possibly enabling Europe<->Australia routes for the first time.
The next big glamour will be the Concorde replacement. Currently, the thought is that supersonic travel can never be made economical enough; that customers would rather bask in luxury aboard an air-yacht like the A380 than pay the price for an unsubsidized supersonic airplane. And given the technical hurdles of the sonic boom (which I think can be solved, but not for the next 30 years), supersonic travel would be limited to only over oceans, which is counter to the current point-to-point market demand.
Given that Boeing recently backed out of supersonic research, it'll be a good long while before it can reclaim the glory crown from Airbus. For 35 years, Boeing held the crown with the 747, inspiration of countless Hollywood movies. Now it's Airbus' turn for the next few decades.
Boeing will continue to be profitable, but without the glory.
The governments in the U.S. should be secular, but secularism should not be forced upon the populace through heavy taxation.
Such large sums of money should not be confiscated upon threat of jail for such purposes.
For more on this redistribution of massive amounts of money inhibiting religion, see the position of a Vatican official
Also see my blog story States' "Blaine Amendments" prohibiting vouchers have roots in anti-Catholicism.(And, really, it's just an extension of traffic cameras, which are equally objectionable to GPS-without-a-warrant.)
Mechanized tracking of the public is not police doing their job. It's police delegating their job to machines. If something is serious enough to track, it should be serious enough to assign a human being -- or at the very least, require a judge to authorize mechanized tracking. If we drop that requirement, then we end up with excess surveillance of the public.
And what's wrong with that? The potential for abuse by a government. We've already seen examples of Clinton and Bush deploying the IRS against its political enemies. Complete surveillance of anyone would be another taxpayer-funded tool of the incumbant to perpetuate his/her personal or party rule. Knowledge is power. If you know your political enemy is cheating on his/her spouse through surveillance logs, that political enemy is instantly destroyed. All it takes is an anonymous call to a tabloid -- no official announcement from the government surveillance agency is necessary.
In general, knowledge through surveillance enables control. Knowing every last detail of a political enemy allows an exploiter to innocuously apply martial arts-style precise pressure to make the enemy's life fall like a house of cards -- for example, slashing the tires on the enemy's car on the day of a critical secret meeting.
The difference between human tracking and machine tracking is the difference between manuscript-copying and the printing press, or between the printing press and the Internet, i.e., qualitative. As Douglas Engelbart has described this phenomenon:
Mechanized surveillance takes traditional surveillance to a new level, and puts too much power in the hands of the government to be used against those opposed to the government's policies. Government should be for the people, not control of the people through mechanized knowledge collection.If so, that would have made a nice concise description of what craigslist is. Or is UseNet so old no one knows or cares about it anymore?