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Comment Re:*sigh* (Score 2, Insightful) 674

Given that the system is inherently tilted towards those with money to pay politicians off, and that the courts are used to get things pushed into law backhandedly rather than through the political process (by both sides), the common folk are left with not a lot of options. Between political/social correctness on the left and fear mongering from the right, both sides seek to use government to infringe on the rights of the people. What happens when you push people into a corner? They fight back. It is perfectly human.

A smash-up distributed network that crosses torrent, freenet, anonymous remailer chains, proxies, and encryption is slowly growing in pieces and will come together eventually. Due to ongoing refusal of those who govern to even attempt to reason with the governed, and due to the governed running from responsibility and intellectual labor, it is inevitable that other systems of communication and information transfer will grow organically to stymie every system of control.

The fault lies with everybody because the governed must in the end give consent to those who govern, whether a democracy or tyranny, for a non-compliant populace cannot be controlled by anything short of a god, as revolutions throughout history prove. As long as the people continue to allow the government and business to do whatever strikes their fancy, they will do so. But their nature circumscribes their will and demands them to actions that flow around obstacles and it will happen. As a result, a system will come about allowing totally untraceable transmission of all kind of information, not just music and movies but illegal materials, spy communications, and terrorist dispatches, and all of it will be beyond anyone's reach to identify who put it out into the cloud and unable to make it go away.

You gotta take the good with the bad in life, but there's a whole lot of bad that is going to be enabled by this, all because no one could get along and come to an understanding.

Comment Security through obscurity... (Score 1) 484

...can't last forever. As in, the Mac platform is no longer a minor niche thing, and with the fundamental change to a BSD/*nix base which opens the architecture to creative accessibility, viruses were a matter of time on the Mac. About damn time they came clean and did the responsible thing and admit it isn't invulnerable. If you want a large market share, it will come with a price of making it a target for miscreants.

Sun Puts its Weight Behind Ubuntu Linux 338

fak3r writes "Sun today announced that they are putting their weight behind Ubuntu Linux. While Ubuntu has been many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now, with its Debian heritage, you can see what kind of server it could be. Slap that on the new Sun 1Us with the new Niagra T1's CPU, the one that'll have four, six or eight cores each, and go to town."

Defending Against Harmful Nanotech and Biotech 193

Maria Williams writes "KurzweilAI.net reported that: This year's recipients of the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award are Robert A. Freitas Jr.and Bill Joy, who have both been proposing solutions to the dangers of advanced technology since 2000. Robert A. Freitas, Jr. has pioneered nanomedicine and analysis of self-replicating nanotechnology. He advocates "an immediate international moratorium, if not outright ban, on all artificial life experiments implemented as nonbiological hardware. In this context, 'artificial life' is defined as autonomous foraging replicators, excluding purely biological implementations (already covered by NIH guidelines tacitly accepted worldwide) and also excluding software simulations which are essential preparatory work and should continue." Bill Joy wrote "Why the future doesn't need us" in Wired in 2000 and with Guardian 2005 Award winner Ray Kurzweil, he wrote the editorial "Recipe for Destruction" in the New York Times (reg. required) in which they argued against publishing the recipe for the 1918 influenza virus. In 2006, he helped launch a $200 million fund directed at developing defenses against biological viruses."

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