Exactly, it's the entire reason behind huge areas of research, particularly in data mining and analysis. What's not being said is generally even more important than what is - the first rule of diplomacy. It's Racists and Sexists that fear frank discussion on race and sex (which should make you look closely at who's driving the political correctness machine in various countries), and it is the same with every other issue.
If you want to know who holds those beliefs strongly, look to who is repressing speech and publication.
I can still remember talking about hiring practices and being told that to read a reference from a previous employer, you only use what is said to compare against what isn't. There are standard things you expect to read - ie, punctual, trustworthy etc. No-one ever writes "This person is late to every shifts and steals from me" - the ex-employee would just toss it out. But if you omit saying certain things, to an experience office manager you can get your point across whilst the ex-employee thinks they got a great reference.
The web is an organic information mass. Anyone trying to carve even small chunks out of that mass is going to create unnatural gaps that will draw notice.
Or, just as a purely hypothetical situation, for some group of people, lets call them an Agency, listening to all phone calls being recieved by a particular person. They'd find it very useful to have an automated system tell them when a particular person calls.
Beats having a bunch of people taking shifts listening and waiting.
Because government officials have never tried to cover up after themselves before? And they havn't got the resources to do it by themselves?
Actually, if anyone is unlikely to use these services, it's probably politicians. They're far better off trusting their close allies to help them cover up then to risk letting an outside company, who may or may not share their political leanings, know that they want information disappeared.
You would definately have to be careful with something like this. It's the same as the US Government's approach to cryptography, the idea that "if you're hiding, you've got something to hide.". A perfectly normal person with something slightly embarressing showing up online (and who hasn't done or said something that would be embarressing to have sprawled across the net?) is likely to draw far more attention if someone finds out they're paying to make that info disappear than if they just left it to get buried in the noise.
And of course, you're trusting the companies that are offering the service. Can we say blackmail? Anonymous leak?
You obviously havn't being paying any attention to our health minister. Great idea, putting a religious fantatic in charge of such issues as abortion and contraception.
We're just as bad, you just don't hear it spoken about as much because we don't have a seperation of church and state clause in the constitution we don't have;)
Can't you see how depressing this kind of reasoning is? That you - hell, we, my country is no better - live in a place where your first thought is "despite the perfectly good, high strength, fast encryption we've got, lets make a dodgy kludge one to avoid confrontation with the government."
In a true democracy, the government is an extension, a physical manifestation, of the will of the people. There should never be a situation where the people have to make concessions to the government.
Of course, if the majority of people were against encryption, that would be a different matter. And might even happen, as the current world governments wield the word terrorist like a weapon and steal liberties in the name of security, whilst the masses applaud.
And, this argument assumes that America is a true democracy, which is quite laughable, but an entirely different discussion.
Simple really. The sun is already up there to be used, moving coal, gas or any other type of non-renewable power-producing consumable would cost a fortune. Besides which, i'm not entirely sure that orbit is "one place where emissions don't matter." There havn't exactly been a lot of study on the effect of greenhouse emissions in a stable orbit, so it's an unfounded assumption;)
Regardless of whether or not it's one place where emissions dont matter, it's also one place where solar power is potentially a lot more cost effective.
And besides, the state I live in is powered entirely by renewable energy (or at least, it was, prior to hooking up to the national grid this year. Obviously import power is excluded from this statement.)
Go hydro!;)
We have to remember that this is only happening for one reason - we let it happen. We should be well passed surprise by now when people in power abuse that power - a proportion of people in power ALWAYS abuse their power, and have been doing so since first someone said "now take a look at this pointy stick I have."
Take a look around at the current political and legislative landscape of the world we all live in and be afraid. The patriot act was just the tip of the iceburg, one step in a growing trend. Laws equally heinous to citizen's rights have been passed all over the world, including, i'm sorry to say, my own home Australia.
There was a small outcry when sedition laws were passed here and our government given permissions to arrest us, hold us in secret and even prevent it from being reported in the press on threat of serious jail time - but nobody did anything, and it was all done so quietly that 90% of the country barely even noticed.
None of us are free, outrage is redundant, the first world looks more and more like a prison camp every day. Fear is the great controller and the media has done a fantastic job in scaring the masses with ghosts and boogey-men.
Actually, having programmed on both systems - and most recently, spending the last few years working on commercial.Net three-tier applications, Windows has become quite a pleasant system to program on. C# keeps the familiar syntax of C and C++ that I personally love (can't stand VB with its dim's and its _'s) and pairs it with the nicest language library i've ever come across.
My personal hope is that one day Mono is able to implement all of.Net's CLR (though admittedly, I havn't looked in a long time so it may be closer than I remember) and we can write.Net apps that will run anywhere.
My only beef with Microsoft with regards to.Net is that they made mono necessary. All they needed to do was produce a version of the runtime for os x and a version for linux, and they'd have achieved what Java wanted to (or, arguably achieved) with a much nicer language and library.
I must admit, my biggest problem with Java was always the UI. They'd have been far better served writing their libraries like QT did - and using the display of each individual windowing system (so it looks different on each os) rather than one that looks crap on all os';)
I find it interesting that Intel immediately jump in with "the ability to run win xp" as a major advantage. Leads me to ponder.
A lot has been said about the OLPC project sticking to open platforms, which may partially be a cost issue and partially an idealistic one. The real question is what is really best for the project? Sticking to open platforms, and open source or completely custom solutions, or a system that allows the use of windows xp?
I say windows and not os x, not because it's particularly better, thats an argument for a different time, but for the next question - is it better that the platform be completely open and/or custom, or that it corresponds to the most used operating system? The system that is used by a large quantity of consumers, the largest perhaps, and the platform that is the target of choice for people trying to make money of these consumers.
The real question is what is better for the students in this country. Not what is better for Microsoft, Intel or indeed Linux and the Open Source movement. Is it enough to give these students a computer, or should we be giving them a computer that gives them the potential to learn the systems in use by a majority of the world?
I guess the other side of the coin is this - if computing technology is about to find it's way into the hands of a lot of people who previously had no access to it, is that going to swell the marketplace such that what was previously a huge market share advantage could well be diluted by the choices made by this project? Every child in Uruguay is a lot of people - and its only a start. When other countries continue, the choice of operating system to learn might not seem quite as trivial as it may right now.
In some ways this is try, I think perhaps you are thinking primarily of application software, however...
Games software in particular are still neck-deep in particularly nasty DRM. Some protections go so far as to refuse to run if they detect drive emulation software - which I might add is not illegal or even immoral to have installed. So software you bought will refuse to install until you uninstall software it doesn't like (sometimes, simply turning off the emulation software isn't enough.)
Worse than that, one protection in particular - Star Force (http://www.star-force.com/protection/protection.p html?c=65) is so proactive in "managing" your digital rights that it has caused many legitimate consumers to be unable to run software they paid for due to the amount of false positives it generates. (Detecting perfectly legitimate software or hardware, many of which that would have nothing to do with piracy or a very lateral connection).
Star-force is so invasive and frustrating for users that some game companies (as I recall, the company behind Galactic Civ's was one) have spoken out against it's use.
And thats only games. High end applications is just as bad. How many people out there remember dealing with plug in hardware dongles? They are still used. A financial package in use at the company I work for requires one to be purchased for each user, and I recall 3DS Max required one some years ago when we used it in a classroom setting.
The software industry is pushing DRM as strongly as ever, they've just abandoned manual page checks (people photocopied manuals), and floppy disk sectors (no-one uses floppies) as useless. Especially these days - a lot of early rpg's used "journal entries", number paragraphs in the manual that the game would tell you to look up instead of displaying the text, as a form of copy protection. It may have been marginally successful then, but these days with incredibly cheap scanners and bandwidth making pdf swapping so cheap, it's not worth the effort.
For as long as there are people afraid they wont get paid, there will be people ready to invent the most horrendously invasive DRM's to frustrate the hell out of us.
What we need is a new economic theory for digital commerce, where the economics of scarcity can no longer apply. (DRM is simply a way of trying to force the scarcity economic model to work for a product, one of the fundamental properties of which is that it will never be scarce. We have plenty of bits;) )
I think really the databases are better if you carry a pda or flashstick that you can store them on, so it doesn't matter which computer you're accessing.
I had a look at PasswordSafe for a while, which sounds like its similar to KeePass you mentioned.
I don't know that it's really fair to keep using the word 'infiltrated' like this. Believe me, i'm not a sympathiser of the Xenu-followers, I think it may well be a cult and certainly should be looked at a lot closer, however saying that they have infiltrated government is at best naive, and at worst pure propaganda. It's no more fair to say the irs was infiltrated by scientology than it is to say that the presedential office was infiltrate by fundamentalist christians. I would be surprised if there were more scientologists in positions of power than their were christians of one denomination or another.
What seperates scientology from other religions in this case is how their adherants act when in those positions, and, more importantly, how the church would ask - or command - them to act. The implication here is that the church of scientology itself, meaning high-up officials with some degree of control, asks these people to abuse their power. Thats what makes the difference between a corrupt organisation and a set of people acting on their own, which, if they seriously didn't encourage it, would be no fault of the church itself.
Another question needs to be asked - is what the church does to protect itself, ie attacking detractors, any difference from the Catholic church protecting paedophiles in order to protect their image? Is it any less horrific?
It's frightening when an organisation seems to have as much power as the Church of Scientology does, but if we give in to the hysterics and forget that there are plenty of other organisations that have as much potential power, and just as bad past histories, then we are in danger of becoming just as bad and just as blind.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, it's the entire reason behind huge areas of research, particularly in data mining and analysis. What's not being said is generally even more important than what is - the first rule of diplomacy. It's Racists and Sexists that fear frank discussion on race and sex (which should make you look closely at who's driving the political correctness machine in various countries), and it is the same with every other issue. If you want to know who holds those beliefs strongly, look to who is repressing speech and publication. I can still remember talking about hiring practices and being told that to read a reference from a previous employer, you only use what is said to compare against what isn't. There are standard things you expect to read - ie, punctual, trustworthy etc. No-one ever writes "This person is late to every shifts and steals from me" - the ex-employee would just toss it out. But if you omit saying certain things, to an experience office manager you can get your point across whilst the ex-employee thinks they got a great reference. The web is an organic information mass. Anyone trying to carve even small chunks out of that mass is going to create unnatural gaps that will draw notice.
Or, just as a purely hypothetical situation, for some group of people, lets call them an Agency, listening to all phone calls being recieved by a particular person. They'd find it very useful to have an automated system tell them when a particular person calls. Beats having a bunch of people taking shifts listening and waiting.
Because government officials have never tried to cover up after themselves before? And they havn't got the resources to do it by themselves? Actually, if anyone is unlikely to use these services, it's probably politicians. They're far better off trusting their close allies to help them cover up then to risk letting an outside company, who may or may not share their political leanings, know that they want information disappeared.
You would definately have to be careful with something like this. It's the same as the US Government's approach to cryptography, the idea that "if you're hiding, you've got something to hide.". A perfectly normal person with something slightly embarressing showing up online (and who hasn't done or said something that would be embarressing to have sprawled across the net?) is likely to draw far more attention if someone finds out they're paying to make that info disappear than if they just left it to get buried in the noise. And of course, you're trusting the companies that are offering the service. Can we say blackmail? Anonymous leak?
You obviously havn't being paying any attention to our health minister. Great idea, putting a religious fantatic in charge of such issues as abortion and contraception. We're just as bad, you just don't hear it spoken about as much because we don't have a seperation of church and state clause in the constitution we don't have ;)
Can't you see how depressing this kind of reasoning is? That you - hell, we, my country is no better - live in a place where your first thought is "despite the perfectly good, high strength, fast encryption we've got, lets make a dodgy kludge one to avoid confrontation with the government." In a true democracy, the government is an extension, a physical manifestation, of the will of the people. There should never be a situation where the people have to make concessions to the government. Of course, if the majority of people were against encryption, that would be a different matter. And might even happen, as the current world governments wield the word terrorist like a weapon and steal liberties in the name of security, whilst the masses applaud. And, this argument assumes that America is a true democracy, which is quite laughable, but an entirely different discussion.
Simple really. The sun is already up there to be used, moving coal, gas or any other type of non-renewable power-producing consumable would cost a fortune. Besides which, i'm not entirely sure that orbit is "one place where emissions don't matter." There havn't exactly been a lot of study on the effect of greenhouse emissions in a stable orbit, so it's an unfounded assumption ;)
Regardless of whether or not it's one place where emissions dont matter, it's also one place where solar power is potentially a lot more cost effective.
And besides, the state I live in is powered entirely by renewable energy (or at least, it was, prior to hooking up to the national grid this year. Obviously import power is excluded from this statement.)
Go hydro! ;)
Viva la Nokia!
We have to remember that this is only happening for one reason - we let it happen. We should be well passed surprise by now when people in power abuse that power - a proportion of people in power ALWAYS abuse their power, and have been doing so since first someone said "now take a look at this pointy stick I have." Take a look around at the current political and legislative landscape of the world we all live in and be afraid. The patriot act was just the tip of the iceburg, one step in a growing trend. Laws equally heinous to citizen's rights have been passed all over the world, including, i'm sorry to say, my own home Australia. There was a small outcry when sedition laws were passed here and our government given permissions to arrest us, hold us in secret and even prevent it from being reported in the press on threat of serious jail time - but nobody did anything, and it was all done so quietly that 90% of the country barely even noticed. None of us are free, outrage is redundant, the first world looks more and more like a prison camp every day. Fear is the great controller and the media has done a fantastic job in scaring the masses with ghosts and boogey-men.
Actually, having programmed on both systems - and most recently, spending the last few years working on commercial .Net three-tier applications, Windows has become quite a pleasant system to program on. C# keeps the familiar syntax of C and C++ that I personally love (can't stand VB with its dim's and its _'s) and pairs it with the nicest language library i've ever come across.
.Net's CLR (though admittedly, I havn't looked in a long time so it may be closer than I remember) and we can write .Net apps that will run anywhere.
.Net is that they made mono necessary. All they needed to do was produce a version of the runtime for os x and a version for linux, and they'd have achieved what Java wanted to (or, arguably achieved) with a much nicer language and library.
;)
My personal hope is that one day Mono is able to implement all of
My only beef with Microsoft with regards to
I must admit, my biggest problem with Java was always the UI. They'd have been far better served writing their libraries like QT did - and using the display of each individual windowing system (so it looks different on each os) rather than one that looks crap on all os'
I find it interesting that Intel immediately jump in with "the ability to run win xp" as a major advantage. Leads me to ponder.
A lot has been said about the OLPC project sticking to open platforms, which may partially be a cost issue and partially an idealistic one. The real question is what is really best for the project? Sticking to open platforms, and open source or completely custom solutions, or a system that allows the use of windows xp?
I say windows and not os x, not because it's particularly better, thats an argument for a different time, but for the next question - is it better that the platform be completely open and/or custom, or that it corresponds to the most used operating system? The system that is used by a large quantity of consumers, the largest perhaps, and the platform that is the target of choice for people trying to make money of these consumers.
The real question is what is better for the students in this country. Not what is better for Microsoft, Intel or indeed Linux and the Open Source movement. Is it enough to give these students a computer, or should we be giving them a computer that gives them the potential to learn the systems in use by a majority of the world?
I guess the other side of the coin is this - if computing technology is about to find it's way into the hands of a lot of people who previously had no access to it, is that going to swell the marketplace such that what was previously a huge market share advantage could well be diluted by the choices made by this project? Every child in Uruguay is a lot of people - and its only a start. When other countries continue, the choice of operating system to learn might not seem quite as trivial as it may right now.
In some ways this is try, I think perhaps you are thinking primarily of application software, however...
p html?c=65) is so proactive in "managing" your digital rights that it has caused many legitimate consumers to be unable to run software they paid for due to the amount of false positives it generates. (Detecting perfectly legitimate software or hardware, many of which that would have nothing to do with piracy or a very lateral connection).
;) )
Games software in particular are still neck-deep in particularly nasty DRM. Some protections go so far as to refuse to run if they detect drive emulation software - which I might add is not illegal or even immoral to have installed. So software you bought will refuse to install until you uninstall software it doesn't like (sometimes, simply turning off the emulation software isn't enough.)
Worse than that, one protection in particular - Star Force (http://www.star-force.com/protection/protection.
Star-force is so invasive and frustrating for users that some game companies (as I recall, the company behind Galactic Civ's was one) have spoken out against it's use.
And thats only games. High end applications is just as bad. How many people out there remember dealing with plug in hardware dongles? They are still used. A financial package in use at the company I work for requires one to be purchased for each user, and I recall 3DS Max required one some years ago when we used it in a classroom setting.
The software industry is pushing DRM as strongly as ever, they've just abandoned manual page checks (people photocopied manuals), and floppy disk sectors (no-one uses floppies) as useless. Especially these days - a lot of early rpg's used "journal entries", number paragraphs in the manual that the game would tell you to look up instead of displaying the text, as a form of copy protection. It may have been marginally successful then, but these days with incredibly cheap scanners and bandwidth making pdf swapping so cheap, it's not worth the effort.
For as long as there are people afraid they wont get paid, there will be people ready to invent the most horrendously invasive DRM's to frustrate the hell out of us.
What we need is a new economic theory for digital commerce, where the economics of scarcity can no longer apply. (DRM is simply a way of trying to force the scarcity economic model to work for a product, one of the fundamental properties of which is that it will never be scarce. We have plenty of bits
I think really the databases are better if you carry a pda or flashstick that you can store them on, so it doesn't matter which computer you're accessing.
I had a look at PasswordSafe for a while, which sounds like its similar to KeePass you mentioned.
http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/
One benefit of it is that its open source, and was originally designed by counterpane (Bruce Schneier)
I don't know that it's really fair to keep using the word 'infiltrated' like this. Believe me, i'm not a sympathiser of the Xenu-followers, I think it may well be a cult and certainly should be looked at a lot closer, however saying that they have infiltrated government is at best naive, and at worst pure propaganda. It's no more fair to say the irs was infiltrated by scientology than it is to say that the presedential office was infiltrate by fundamentalist christians. I would be surprised if there were more scientologists in positions of power than their were christians of one denomination or another.
What seperates scientology from other religions in this case is how their adherants act when in those positions, and, more importantly, how the church would ask - or command - them to act. The implication here is that the church of scientology itself, meaning high-up officials with some degree of control, asks these people to abuse their power. Thats what makes the difference between a corrupt organisation and a set of people acting on their own, which, if they seriously didn't encourage it, would be no fault of the church itself.
Another question needs to be asked - is what the church does to protect itself, ie attacking detractors, any difference from the Catholic church protecting paedophiles in order to protect their image? Is it any less horrific?
It's frightening when an organisation seems to have as much power as the Church of Scientology does, but if we give in to the hysterics and forget that there are plenty of other organisations that have as much potential power, and just as bad past histories, then we are in danger of becoming just as bad and just as blind.