"F. Marc de Piolenc"
Dear Michael,
Michael Motyka wrote:
Won't it be wonderful if the Court rules in favor of the 1st?
OTOH, why trust in a corruptible legal system?
Use cash and don't leave the ID information at the goddam bookstore in the first place. If you're going to keep the book and you can't deduct it, peel stickers, destroy receipts. Duh!
That's fine for the clued-in folk like us, but what the bookdealers are fighting for is the vital but fragile asset of consumer confidence. Joe Sixpack is going to think twice about buying a book on sexual impotence - not to mention the Anarchist Cookbook - if he thinks Big Brother is going to be following his purchases. So a favorable court decision will mean much to the trade.
Both responses are required.
It is time for books to be published on CD. Using open-source tools and good encryption, then the fascists can't even tell what you read. Unless your OS is corrupted.
E-books are already a fact, but most are sold with the same retail machinery as regular books, so changing the medium doesn't change the risk.
I mean something more along the lines of encrypting each of your electronic books and burning it to a CD. Nobody should be able to tell by looking what you read, nobody should be able to compromise someone else's library. Then the issue of reading habits become null. All tools should be open source. Essentially they already exist - just need a little packaging.
Hack CD burners to add a SetBurnerIDCode command.
Sorry. Could you expand on the significance of this for non-programmers? What does this command accomplish? Is it in firmware?
Each data set written to a CDR contains a mfg id code and a unit serial number. This is stored in FLASH or ROM somewhere and the firmware simply includes this info when writing - probably in some header somewhere. I don't remember, it's been ten years since I looked at CD formats. I don't know exactly how much work this would be but I would guess that it is very feasible. Simply put it might be nice to have a raw read/write capability.
Gather, duplicate and distribute widely state, federal and unpopular information that is quickly disappearing.
Yes! I've been doing that for about 20 years, but I'm fettered now by not being able to visit my favorite research libraries in the States.
It's a huge problem, literally. There are bazillions of MB of data out there in the form of maps, R&D reports and other stuff. Shrub and his corpfasc entourage are going to delete it from the public space over the next few years.