fscking comment system at my < and > tags, that should have been ... incantations they were taught by <friend/relative/tech support> and then are grateful for whatever happens...
The point is, if they don't know there's an alternative, they won't know if it "does what they need it to do" or not. A lot of technologically inept users treat their computer like some sort of magical device, they recite the magical incantations they were taught by and then are grateful for whatever happens whether it's what they wanted or not. They don't bother to try something new, or even realize that there's more than one way to do something because they don't really understand what it is they're doing in the first place. In that regard, almost anything "does what they need it to do" as they define "what they need it to do" to be to respond to the particular sequence of actions they were shown how to do with the response they've come to expect. These are the sort of users that if you told them 5 years ago that they needed to rub their head before typing their password in so that static electricity doesn't interfere with the password entry, they would to this day rub their head prior to typing their password. Does that mean that a password entry system that requires they rub their head before typing their password is a system that "does what they need it to do"? No, although it's what they expect it to do, because they don't know any better.
Ultimately though this isn't even about users that don't know any better, it's about the inability of the users that do want something else to actually make that choice (either for personal or security reasons). It should be possible to uninstall IE, and the fact that it's not is equal parts the fault of Microsoft and the software manufacturers that assume it will be available and bundle it into their applications. IE should be an optional part of Windows, with ideally the ability to deselect it as an installed component during Windows installation, or baring that at least the ability to uninstall it after the fact. Software that relies on IE being present should bundle the necessary DLLs, or preferably offer a way for the user to select the rendering engine to use (technical issues aside here). The fact is, if it was discovered tomorrow that IE had some glaring flaw (shocking I know) that allows a machine to be completely taken over and there was already a worm making the rounds exploiting that flaw, you would be vulnerable to that worm until MS decided to release a patch even if you never used IE and didn't want it. Anything that the computer can run without, it should be possible to uninstall (more specifically for anything that has an alternative implementation available it should be possible to install the alternative and uninstall the original).
Only yesterday I read an article (found through Reddit) called (paraphrasing) "You are not a macroeconomist - you are a geek" - about all the Reddit/Digg/whatever people that think they understand the economy and how to fix it.
Who the hell would be so deluded as to think they know how to "fix" the economy? I mean, I know some things that are wrong with the economy (in a broad general sense), and I've got some ideas on how some of those issues might be addressed, but I'd never claim to have "the solution" to all our economic worries, and anyone that does is full of it even if they are a macro-economist. The same could be said of almost any non-trivial issue in any field. IANAL and I wouldn't claim to know how to totally fix our legal system, but that doesn't mean I don't have some ideas that I think would improve it, or that just because IANAL that those ideas aren't good ideas (and even if you are a lawyer that doesn't mean your ideas are automatically good either). I am a programmer, and I've got some ideas that would be nice to have in a programming language, but I'd never try to claim it was "The One True Language" and would make all other obsolete, or that just because someone isn't a programmer that they wouldn't be able to provide useful ideas or suggestions.
And I would like to add, it reveals a lot about the 'accuser' when they confront you on something they think motivated you. Say for example Bob consoles Alice after her breakup with her BFF Jill, at which point Cockead C accuses Bob of trying to get into Alice's pants. This shows that Cockhead C has assumed that is what motivates B, since that is what C would have done. Provided that B isn't shocked for having been found out, his motivation being something else, he now knows that C is a terrible person.
Or that C believes B to be a terrible person. All that it really shows is that C has some reason to believe that B is motivated by wanting to have sex with A, and that C has the capacity (read experience) to be able to conceive of someone motivated as such. It's possible to be able to conceive of someone being motivated by something without actually being motivated as such yourself.
Same limitation applies to SLI, to a certain extent. From what I understand the cards can make use of part of their memory independently of each other for calculations with only a portion of the memory being mirrored between the two. It's somewhat akin to how if you have two CPU cores you don't get double the processing power, but somewhat more then what you would have with a single core. Lets say you SLI (or CrossFire) a pair of 2G cards, and that 1G of the memory is mirrored, what you effectively have is 3G of video memory, although each card can only access 1G for individual processing.
The only thing that might be novel is if this phatomOS goes whole hog, and forces you to use that api and actually denies you all access directly to files using more traditional methods. But I have my doubts... that would make it needlessly incompatible with a lot of existing software.
If you read TFA that's more or less what it does. Essentially the OS will be one gigantic VM and all the applications will be loaded into one giant address space with no process separation. Apparently he's relying on having no VM instruction for accessing anything you don't already have a object reference for to protect processes from doing dirty things to each other. Presumably the OS itself would auto-inject some basic objects into the processes objects to bootstrap the process, otherwise it's not really useful for a whole hell of a lot.
Biggest problem I see with this, is the whole persistent process thing. There have been similar things tried in the past, for instance PalmOS had a behavior very similar to this, but it tends to be more trouble than it's worth. There's also a very good reason why we use files in some instances, such as for storing documents that parallel physical ones (that is, most things that come out of Office type products). A file represents a very convenient discrete packet of information separate from the application that produced it, and that is easily transferable, archiveable, and processable, without adding the overhead of bundling a particular instance of an application along with it. Other problems this introduces include how to handle a crashed program, or one that has managed to get itself into an inoperable state. How difficult is it to "rollback" a process to an initial state, particularly without doing the same to every other process in the system. Does doing so wipe out your configuration options? What if those options are the reason the process isn't working?
For an embedded device in certain specialized environments this sort of thing might work very well, but it's certainly not a good idea as a primary OS in your typical desktop or work environment.
No offense, but those all sound like really scummy things to do and would cause me not to go to any site that did things like that. Of course I'm probably not your target audience anyway, so I probably wouldn't be going to the sites in the first place. Those first two in particular (also the most difficult to work around) would put me off almost immediately, as unless I need to get something specific (like tech support, driver downloads, or to order something) from a site if the first thing it does it popup a empty page with nothing but a big flash movie I never bother going back to that site. Requiring silverlight at all, even if I need something means I don't bother. I figure flash is bad enough, we really don't need MS flash as that's just asking for trouble. Absolute worst case scenario if I really need something from a site using silverlight, I'd just use one of the windows VM images I have, take a snapshot to restore to later, and then install silverlight.
To be perfectly honest, I mostly block ads for two reasons, the most important of which is security. It's been shown on several occasions that ad providers can make excellent infection vectors. The second reason is mostly just to avoid the wasted screen space, and in the case of some of the DHTML ones, the browser lag caused by the ads. Back when/. just put banner ads at the top of the screen I didn't mind them so much and would often disable adblock on/., and even one time actually clicked one of the ads (thinkgeek ad for a interesting tool). This new thing however where ads are embedded inside the discussion threads has me re-enabling adblock as they now waste screen space when I'm trying to read the comments. The thing that pushed me to add NoScript to my regularly used extension list was those annoying IntelliTXT ads that at the time were causing my browser to slow to a crawl for a few seconds everytime I accidentally moused over one, and then further added insult to injury by obscuring the text under the ad I was trying to read.
Out of curiosity was there anything you found to be better in OO.org (aside from being free of course)? I'm not exactly a "power user" of the Office products so aside from opening what other people send me I tend not to use them much and as such I've been perfectly happy with OO.org for a while now, but I'm curious how they stack up in the eyes of someone that actually has a use for more than 2% of the features both offer.
BTW, it doesn't actually obfuscate the source (not in the traditional sense of the word anyway). I've personally decompiled flash files before and it's quite simple to figure out most of the content (exception being if you're trying to extract images, which depending on how they're actually stored or composited in the video could be very tricky).
BTW, not sure how you've got your hosts file configured, but if you redirect ad sites to localhost it helps to run a web server that does nothing but serve up a blank image file for any requests that way you don't get broken image links or have to wait for the requests to time out. Personally I run eDexter.
Out of curiosity, how do you determine if someone is viewing your adverts? Do you host them yourself, or does your ad provider have some sort of service to let you know if someone is blocking ads?
One of the things I've found is that disabling the popup banner makes for a cleaner less-intrusive experience. I tend to ignore NoScript unless a site isn't working properly in which case I'll go selectively enable things temporarily (or permanently if I trust them, like youtube.com). It's a minor thing but it does remove the distraction of that bar showing up on every other site.
There are a number of sites I go to that have these damn click to pop ads, I'd still like to visit the site but without the ads. If I have to turn off NoScript anyway, it's gained me nothing.
Most sites don't host the script for their own ads, rather they use a third party script to do so. In most cases you can unblock a site, but still leave the ad providers site blocked. One of the replies to my original comment also reminded me of the fact that a while ago I modified my hosts file to black-hole all of the worst offenders with regards to ads/malware, and I run eDexter to serve up blank image files in their place.
Just as an example, right now I've got slashdot.org allowed, but doubleclick.net and google-analytics.com blocked, which allows me to use the comments and such on/., but blocks all the ads.
FYI, I've yet to find one of these which I suspect is because in addition to running AdBlock Plus, I also regularly use NoScript. The combination of the two swats 99% of ads of all kinds, and completely kills any popups unless I specifically enable them on a site.
That's true, and would be an interesting use of the data, but you have to consider the primary application this would be applied to. Something like this holds little value for someone in the same field who travels in the same circles as they're already aware of the reputations and merit of other researchers in their field of study, or baring a recommendation from someone they know, they should be capable of reviewing the paper for themselves and deciding if it has merit. Where this does provide insight is to the outside observer who may not know who the crackpots are, who can be trusted, and who lacks the detailed knowledge of that field to be able to evaluate the merit of a paper. In this later case there must be certain organizations or individuals that are well established to the point of being discernible to the outsider and can act as a starting point for establishing credibility.
Yes, but for the web of trust to have value to the casual observer certain respected authorities need to be established which is something people tend to do naturally on their own. If something like this is implemented it will most likely never have an official authority, but it will have several de-facto ones that people will come to associate as authority figures. Essentially someone not well entrenched in a particular field may not know if Dr. X who's work is signed by Dr. Y, is any good, but they have heard of Journal Z who signed for Dr. Y, and therefore provide credibility for Dr. X.
Interesting point. Something that occurs to me however is that any paper worth its salt really has two things that can be verified/approved independently of each other. The first, and easier of the two is the test procedures, and any math/established formula used. Assuming that no flaw can be found with that, you move on the second part, which is the theory being proposed to explain the results of the tests and/or how any discrepancies between the observed results and the theory are handled. It's entirely possible to have a paper that has excellent test results that raise interesting questions, but a completely nutjob theory attached to it. To ignore the results of the tests because the theory is crazy is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Likewise, just because the theory proposed in a paper is a well established and respected theory is no reason to sign off on flawed test results.
The problem of course is that at some level you still need to have a known good reference for the whole "web" to work. It doesn't help your credibility at all if you've got a paper signed by 100 of your closest crackpot buddies. What this does provide is the ability for someone in addition to established authorities to vet a work, such that a well respected member of the scientific community can easily and in a verifiable fashion signify his approval of a paper.
Whether it occurs intentionally or accidentally, it still boils down to censorship as the government through it's own action (or lack thereof) has made it illegal to sell certain games, based on their content. Censorship says nothing about willfully, or maliciously preventing the sale of something (although it is generally implied).
Couldn't you just wrap your passport in tinfoil, so that the RFID chip only worked when it was open? Then it would still work for valid uses and would be undetectable the rest of the time.
Maybe, not sure how well that would actually shield it. That's not really the point though, as putting RFID in anything you wouldn't want to be publicly available is just plain stupid. It's not even a question of government monitoring so much (even though that is a concern) as it is stupidly misapplying a technology to situations it's not suited to. As someone else has commented even if you shield your passport/creditcard/whatever at all times except when you use it, you still need to take it out to use it, and during those few minutes its broadcasting to anybody with the right equipment in range. Is it so hard to imagine someone sitting in a parking lot at a store sniffing credit card numbers of shoppers (or more plausibly at the next pump over at a gas station), or someone sitting near the security checkpoint at the airport with a sniffer hidden inside their luggage? Would it really draw any attention if someone came in, sat down for a while, said "whoops, this is the wrong terminal" and then left?
What people seem to be forgetting in all this is that RFID is designed to replace what is essentially a large publicly viewable label, so anything you wouldn't want glued to the front of your shirt in 60 pt. font for everyone to see, should not be done using RFID.
OK, time for a little copyright theory. When dealing with non-physical goods (that is, more or less anything currently covered under the umbrella of Intellectual Property) you're got two competing drives. On the one hand, you want it to be freely available to everyone so society can benefit from it, and so that we can progress intellectually (that is, in short not waste time re-inventing the wheel, but make a better one instead). On the other hand you need a system of incentive to repay the creator for the effort that went into producing the item (remember non-physical, so this isn't the production cost, but rather the time cost of creating the original). Various cultures over the years have come up with various ways to balance these two to varying degrees of success. The approach the American forefathers took was to side with the creator for the short term by granting a temporary monopoly, but the public in the long term by limiting the term of that monopoly to a short period (I'd need to go look it up, but I believe it was something like 15 years). The thought behind this was that the short term monopoly would provide enough time for the creator to recoup the time cost plus some measure of profit, while long term still making the good available for free to the public (public domain). Over the years this has been grossly perverted to the benefit of the producer and the detriment of society, such that we have the current state of affairs where copyright of any new works is effectively infinite, thus completely depriving society of the benefit of the good.
I should also add that regardless of your intent, comparing software to any type of physical goods is futile and only hurting your argument.
I feel obliged to point out azadrozny started down that road when he compared using pirated software for non-commercial purposes to be like stealing from a grocery store, jonbryce simply continued in the same vein. As you so rightfully pointed out, you can't really compare copyright infringement to theft of a physical good. Jonbryce probably should have stated as such, but instead he tried to figure out a way to make the analogy a more accurate fit (a somewhat futile endeavor as you need to come up with a way for a person to steal something without depriving the original owner of it, which at the very least contradicts the definition of steal).
Slashdot Mirror
fscking comment system at my < and > tags, that should have been
... incantations they were taught by <friend/relative/tech support> and then are grateful for whatever happens...
The point is, if they don't know there's an alternative, they won't know if it "does what they need it to do" or not. A lot of technologically inept users treat their computer like some sort of magical device, they recite the magical incantations they were taught by and then are grateful for whatever happens whether it's what they wanted or not. They don't bother to try something new, or even realize that there's more than one way to do something because they don't really understand what it is they're doing in the first place. In that regard, almost anything "does what they need it to do" as they define "what they need it to do" to be to respond to the particular sequence of actions they were shown how to do with the response they've come to expect. These are the sort of users that if you told them 5 years ago that they needed to rub their head before typing their password in so that static electricity doesn't interfere with the password entry, they would to this day rub their head prior to typing their password. Does that mean that a password entry system that requires they rub their head before typing their password is a system that "does what they need it to do"? No, although it's what they expect it to do, because they don't know any better.
Ultimately though this isn't even about users that don't know any better, it's about the inability of the users that do want something else to actually make that choice (either for personal or security reasons). It should be possible to uninstall IE, and the fact that it's not is equal parts the fault of Microsoft and the software manufacturers that assume it will be available and bundle it into their applications. IE should be an optional part of Windows, with ideally the ability to deselect it as an installed component during Windows installation, or baring that at least the ability to uninstall it after the fact. Software that relies on IE being present should bundle the necessary DLLs, or preferably offer a way for the user to select the rendering engine to use (technical issues aside here). The fact is, if it was discovered tomorrow that IE had some glaring flaw (shocking I know) that allows a machine to be completely taken over and there was already a worm making the rounds exploiting that flaw, you would be vulnerable to that worm until MS decided to release a patch even if you never used IE and didn't want it. Anything that the computer can run without, it should be possible to uninstall (more specifically for anything that has an alternative implementation available it should be possible to install the alternative and uninstall the original).
Only yesterday I read an article (found through Reddit) called (paraphrasing) "You are not a macroeconomist - you are a geek" - about all the Reddit/Digg/whatever people that think they understand the economy and how to fix it.
Who the hell would be so deluded as to think they know how to "fix" the economy? I mean, I know some things that are wrong with the economy (in a broad general sense), and I've got some ideas on how some of those issues might be addressed, but I'd never claim to have "the solution" to all our economic worries, and anyone that does is full of it even if they are a macro-economist. The same could be said of almost any non-trivial issue in any field. IANAL and I wouldn't claim to know how to totally fix our legal system, but that doesn't mean I don't have some ideas that I think would improve it, or that just because IANAL that those ideas aren't good ideas (and even if you are a lawyer that doesn't mean your ideas are automatically good either). I am a programmer, and I've got some ideas that would be nice to have in a programming language, but I'd never try to claim it was "The One True Language" and would make all other obsolete, or that just because someone isn't a programmer that they wouldn't be able to provide useful ideas or suggestions.
And I would like to add, it reveals a lot about the 'accuser' when they confront you on something they think motivated you. Say for example Bob consoles Alice after her breakup with her BFF Jill, at which point Cockead C accuses Bob of trying to get into Alice's pants. This shows that Cockhead C has assumed that is what motivates B, since that is what C would have done. Provided that B isn't shocked for having been found out, his motivation being something else, he now knows that C is a terrible person.
Or that C believes B to be a terrible person. All that it really shows is that C has some reason to believe that B is motivated by wanting to have sex with A, and that C has the capacity (read experience) to be able to conceive of someone motivated as such. It's possible to be able to conceive of someone being motivated by something without actually being motivated as such yourself.
Same limitation applies to SLI, to a certain extent. From what I understand the cards can make use of part of their memory independently of each other for calculations with only a portion of the memory being mirrored between the two. It's somewhat akin to how if you have two CPU cores you don't get double the processing power, but somewhat more then what you would have with a single core. Lets say you SLI (or CrossFire) a pair of 2G cards, and that 1G of the memory is mirrored, what you effectively have is 3G of video memory, although each card can only access 1G for individual processing.
The only thing that might be novel is if this phatomOS goes whole hog, and forces you to use that api and actually denies you all access directly to files using more traditional methods. But I have my doubts... that would make it needlessly incompatible with a lot of existing software.
If you read TFA that's more or less what it does. Essentially the OS will be one gigantic VM and all the applications will be loaded into one giant address space with no process separation. Apparently he's relying on having no VM instruction for accessing anything you don't already have a object reference for to protect processes from doing dirty things to each other. Presumably the OS itself would auto-inject some basic objects into the processes objects to bootstrap the process, otherwise it's not really useful for a whole hell of a lot.
Biggest problem I see with this, is the whole persistent process thing. There have been similar things tried in the past, for instance PalmOS had a behavior very similar to this, but it tends to be more trouble than it's worth. There's also a very good reason why we use files in some instances, such as for storing documents that parallel physical ones (that is, most things that come out of Office type products). A file represents a very convenient discrete packet of information separate from the application that produced it, and that is easily transferable, archiveable, and processable, without adding the overhead of bundling a particular instance of an application along with it. Other problems this introduces include how to handle a crashed program, or one that has managed to get itself into an inoperable state. How difficult is it to "rollback" a process to an initial state, particularly without doing the same to every other process in the system. Does doing so wipe out your configuration options? What if those options are the reason the process isn't working?
For an embedded device in certain specialized environments this sort of thing might work very well, but it's certainly not a good idea as a primary OS in your typical desktop or work environment.
No offense, but those all sound like really scummy things to do and would cause me not to go to any site that did things like that. Of course I'm probably not your target audience anyway, so I probably wouldn't be going to the sites in the first place. Those first two in particular (also the most difficult to work around) would put me off almost immediately, as unless I need to get something specific (like tech support, driver downloads, or to order something) from a site if the first thing it does it popup a empty page with nothing but a big flash movie I never bother going back to that site. Requiring silverlight at all, even if I need something means I don't bother. I figure flash is bad enough, we really don't need MS flash as that's just asking for trouble. Absolute worst case scenario if I really need something from a site using silverlight, I'd just use one of the windows VM images I have, take a snapshot to restore to later, and then install silverlight.
/. just put banner ads at the top of the screen I didn't mind them so much and would often disable adblock on /., and even one time actually clicked one of the ads (thinkgeek ad for a interesting tool). This new thing however where ads are embedded inside the discussion threads has me re-enabling adblock as they now waste screen space when I'm trying to read the comments. The thing that pushed me to add NoScript to my regularly used extension list was those annoying IntelliTXT ads that at the time were causing my browser to slow to a crawl for a few seconds everytime I accidentally moused over one, and then further added insult to injury by obscuring the text under the ad I was trying to read.
To be perfectly honest, I mostly block ads for two reasons, the most important of which is security. It's been shown on several occasions that ad providers can make excellent infection vectors. The second reason is mostly just to avoid the wasted screen space, and in the case of some of the DHTML ones, the browser lag caused by the ads. Back when
Out of curiosity was there anything you found to be better in OO.org (aside from being free of course)? I'm not exactly a "power user" of the Office products so aside from opening what other people send me I tend not to use them much and as such I've been perfectly happy with OO.org for a while now, but I'm curious how they stack up in the eyes of someone that actually has a use for more than 2% of the features both offer.
Tell me instead, how much value would the average Windows user get from GNU/Linux?
To be perfectly fair you would also have to tell us how much value the average GNU/Linux user would get out of Windows as well.
BTW, it doesn't actually obfuscate the source (not in the traditional sense of the word anyway). I've personally decompiled flash files before and it's quite simple to figure out most of the content (exception being if you're trying to extract images, which depending on how they're actually stored or composited in the video could be very tricky).
BTW, not sure how you've got your hosts file configured, but if you redirect ad sites to localhost it helps to run a web server that does nothing but serve up a blank image file for any requests that way you don't get broken image links or have to wait for the requests to time out. Personally I run eDexter.
Out of curiosity, how do you determine if someone is viewing your adverts? Do you host them yourself, or does your ad provider have some sort of service to let you know if someone is blocking ads?
One of the things I've found is that disabling the popup banner makes for a cleaner less-intrusive experience. I tend to ignore NoScript unless a site isn't working properly in which case I'll go selectively enable things temporarily (or permanently if I trust them, like youtube.com). It's a minor thing but it does remove the distraction of that bar showing up on every other site.
There are a number of sites I go to that have these damn click to pop ads, I'd still like to visit the site but without the ads. If I have to turn off NoScript anyway, it's gained me nothing.
Most sites don't host the script for their own ads, rather they use a third party script to do so. In most cases you can unblock a site, but still leave the ad providers site blocked. One of the replies to my original comment also reminded me of the fact that a while ago I modified my hosts file to black-hole all of the worst offenders with regards to ads/malware, and I run eDexter to serve up blank image files in their place.
/., but blocks all the ads.
Just as an example, right now I've got slashdot.org allowed, but doubleclick.net and google-analytics.com blocked, which allows me to use the comments and such on
FYI, I've yet to find one of these which I suspect is because in addition to running AdBlock Plus, I also regularly use NoScript. The combination of the two swats 99% of ads of all kinds, and completely kills any popups unless I specifically enable them on a site.
That is essentially the point I was trying to make.
That's true, and would be an interesting use of the data, but you have to consider the primary application this would be applied to. Something like this holds little value for someone in the same field who travels in the same circles as they're already aware of the reputations and merit of other researchers in their field of study, or baring a recommendation from someone they know, they should be capable of reviewing the paper for themselves and deciding if it has merit. Where this does provide insight is to the outside observer who may not know who the crackpots are, who can be trusted, and who lacks the detailed knowledge of that field to be able to evaluate the merit of a paper. In this later case there must be certain organizations or individuals that are well established to the point of being discernible to the outsider and can act as a starting point for establishing credibility.
Yes, but for the web of trust to have value to the casual observer certain respected authorities need to be established which is something people tend to do naturally on their own. If something like this is implemented it will most likely never have an official authority, but it will have several de-facto ones that people will come to associate as authority figures. Essentially someone not well entrenched in a particular field may not know if Dr. X who's work is signed by Dr. Y, is any good, but they have heard of Journal Z who signed for Dr. Y, and therefore provide credibility for Dr. X.
Interesting point. Something that occurs to me however is that any paper worth its salt really has two things that can be verified/approved independently of each other. The first, and easier of the two is the test procedures, and any math/established formula used. Assuming that no flaw can be found with that, you move on the second part, which is the theory being proposed to explain the results of the tests and/or how any discrepancies between the observed results and the theory are handled. It's entirely possible to have a paper that has excellent test results that raise interesting questions, but a completely nutjob theory attached to it. To ignore the results of the tests because the theory is crazy is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Likewise, just because the theory proposed in a paper is a well established and respected theory is no reason to sign off on flawed test results.
The problem of course is that at some level you still need to have a known good reference for the whole "web" to work. It doesn't help your credibility at all if you've got a paper signed by 100 of your closest crackpot buddies. What this does provide is the ability for someone in addition to established authorities to vet a work, such that a well respected member of the scientific community can easily and in a verifiable fashion signify his approval of a paper.
Whether it occurs intentionally or accidentally, it still boils down to censorship as the government through it's own action (or lack thereof) has made it illegal to sell certain games, based on their content. Censorship says nothing about willfully, or maliciously preventing the sale of something (although it is generally implied).
Couldn't you just wrap your passport in tinfoil, so that the RFID chip only worked when it was open? Then it would still work for valid uses and would be undetectable the rest of the time.
Maybe, not sure how well that would actually shield it. That's not really the point though, as putting RFID in anything you wouldn't want to be publicly available is just plain stupid. It's not even a question of government monitoring so much (even though that is a concern) as it is stupidly misapplying a technology to situations it's not suited to. As someone else has commented even if you shield your passport/creditcard/whatever at all times except when you use it, you still need to take it out to use it, and during those few minutes its broadcasting to anybody with the right equipment in range. Is it so hard to imagine someone sitting in a parking lot at a store sniffing credit card numbers of shoppers (or more plausibly at the next pump over at a gas station), or someone sitting near the security checkpoint at the airport with a sniffer hidden inside their luggage? Would it really draw any attention if someone came in, sat down for a while, said "whoops, this is the wrong terminal" and then left?
What people seem to be forgetting in all this is that RFID is designed to replace what is essentially a large publicly viewable label, so anything you wouldn't want glued to the front of your shirt in 60 pt. font for everyone to see, should not be done using RFID.
OK, time for a little copyright theory. When dealing with non-physical goods (that is, more or less anything currently covered under the umbrella of Intellectual Property) you're got two competing drives. On the one hand, you want it to be freely available to everyone so society can benefit from it, and so that we can progress intellectually (that is, in short not waste time re-inventing the wheel, but make a better one instead). On the other hand you need a system of incentive to repay the creator for the effort that went into producing the item (remember non-physical, so this isn't the production cost, but rather the time cost of creating the original). Various cultures over the years have come up with various ways to balance these two to varying degrees of success. The approach the American forefathers took was to side with the creator for the short term by granting a temporary monopoly, but the public in the long term by limiting the term of that monopoly to a short period (I'd need to go look it up, but I believe it was something like 15 years). The thought behind this was that the short term monopoly would provide enough time for the creator to recoup the time cost plus some measure of profit, while long term still making the good available for free to the public (public domain). Over the years this has been grossly perverted to the benefit of the producer and the detriment of society, such that we have the current state of affairs where copyright of any new works is effectively infinite, thus completely depriving society of the benefit of the good.
I should also add that regardless of your intent, comparing software to any type of physical goods is futile and only hurting your argument.
I feel obliged to point out azadrozny started down that road when he compared using pirated software for non-commercial purposes to be like stealing from a grocery store, jonbryce simply continued in the same vein. As you so rightfully pointed out, you can't really compare copyright infringement to theft of a physical good. Jonbryce probably should have stated as such, but instead he tried to figure out a way to make the analogy a more accurate fit (a somewhat futile endeavor as you need to come up with a way for a person to steal something without depriving the original owner of it, which at the very least contradicts the definition of steal).