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I would prefer to get my pot from a pharmacist, who in turn, got it from a government controlled farm.

Sorry, Comrade, pack your red bags and got to Cuba or North Korea. Why the hell do *I* have to support your bad habits?

Simply because I could be sure that I am getting a quality product and the government could have a pretty high increase in tax income, instead of spending money on catching and prosecuting users and small-time traffickers. Organized crime (yes, and terrorist groups, rogue nations etc. think of the political lobbying that is possible right now...) wouldn't get its share, and I would be happy about it.

Yes, that has been soooo effective with cigarettes and concrete in NYC right? No mob influence or revenue there huh? Nope, not a bit if your head is buried in the sand!

Where does this notion come from that if the government has a regulatory role, or if the government taxes the shit out of something that profiteers are not going to come in and make money off of the artificially inflated price or the restricted distribution? What world do you live in?

Yes, your disinformation strategy bit has a kernel of truth, however the rest of your post is a completely different type of disinformation.

Fascists in denial like you really need to get a grasp on what you are advocating.

Yea, that's what I meant. Thank you.

I was noticing how similiar the Green Party is to my favorite, the Fascists. But whenever I bring it up the Greens/Socialists/Communists all get pissed off! It was proven perfect before, maybe we can move back to the Green way soon.

Let's be honest, Christianity and Judaism haven't been as bad to us as many seem to think. (...)

An important thing is to note that both these religion are "relatively mature". (Hold on that flamethrower for a while as I explain)

Islam was born circa 632 AD and spread relatively far and would probably have done so in the European kingdoms if Martel didn't defeat the muslim forces at Poitiers (732 AD)

It was at this time that the Europe was plunged in the Dark Age and immobilism by the Catholic Church (a bout or two of plague didn't help, too)

The Dark Age lasted for more than 1,000 years before being dispelled by the Age of Reason and Enlightenment (Le siècle des lumières).

It then took about 200 years to reach a "relative maturity" where the religious institutions now have to answer for their actions.

Islam splintered and entered itself its Dark Age about 200 years after Christianism.(See Sh'ia and Sunnism, among other events)

My motion is that Islam is "a bit late" (200 years). Maybe, we are seeing the last spasms of radical Islamism and we'll see dramatic improvements in important areas (women's rights, religious tolerance, etc)

Disclaimers:

• I type this in a hurry. You're welcome to do your own research.
• Women rights: catholics were much worse than current muslims extremists.
• While I'm catholic, I don't recognize the Vatican (and, given the current scandals, probably never will)

Let's be honest, Christianity and Judaism haven't been as bad to us as many seem to think. (...)

An important thing is to note that both these religion are "relatively mature". (Hold on that flamethrower for a while as I explain)

Islam was born circa 632 AD and spread relatively far and would probably have done so in the European kingdoms if Martel didn't defeat the muslim forces at Poitiers (732 AD)

It was at this time that the Europe was plunged in the Dark Age and immobilism by the Catholic Church (a bout or two of plague didn't help, too)

The Dark Age lasted for more than 1,000 years before being dispelled by the Age of Reason and Enlightenment (Le siècle des lumières).

It then took about 200 years to reach a "relative maturity" where the religious institutions now have to answer for their actions.

Islam splintered and entered itself its Dark Age about 200 years after Christianism.(See Sh'ia and Sunnism, among other events)

My motion is that Islam is "a bit late" (200 years). Maybe, we are seeing the last spasms of radical Islamism and we'll see dramatic improvements in important areas (women's rights, religious tolerance, etc)

Disclaimers:

• I type this in a hurry. You're welcome to do your own research.
• Women rights: catholics were much worse than current muslims extremists.
• While I'm catholic, I don't recognize the Vatican (and, given the current scandals, probably never will)

Interestingly, Aristotle proposed that the world was created in eternity. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that God could have created the world either in time OR in eternity, but there was no way to prove one way or the other. He did note, however, that God must have created the universe, since the universe is not pure act. BTW, I've never read a decent refutation of Thomas' "first way." The argument of God's existence from motion. Anyone have a good counter argument?

That would be a Ribbentrop cocktail

We defeated a nation controlled by left-wing ideology in WWII...

And that nation would be....? The Nazis were anything but left wing. They suppressed the socialist and Communist parties and followed no policies of their own that were founded on Marx or any socialist philosopher or economist. As for Italy and Japan, they were as right-wing as you could want.

Yet at the same time this same "liberal" is generally very much in favor of things like socialism.

You do not appear to know anything about liberals or socialism. Very briefly, socialism advocates public ownership of industry. All of the big Washington liberals (Kennedy, Lieberman, Clinton, Daschle, etc.) are solid free marketers.

Authority that is not accountable and vulnerable to the will of the people is tyrrany.

Every liberal and conservative and all shades in between agree with that bit of bombast. And that "will of the people" demogoguery doesn't sound anything like libertarianism. I thought libertarians were suspicious of mass movements and mob psychology that threaten the rights of individuals, dissidents and minorities. In any case, the Founding Fathers thoughtfully set up an independent judiciary as a check on the will of people in case it ever got out of hand, which it often does.

> Finally, while man may not have created global warming, our industrial revolution has certainly contributed ..

I'm not sure what you mean by our industrial revolution, but it's commonly accepted to date industrial revolution back to the mid 19th century at its latest.

2c

I guess you missed the day in history class when you were supposed to learn about how the US Army distributed blankets known to be laced with smallpox to tribes of Indians that were being forceably relocated to reservations in the 1800s. This practice actually appears to have began in the mid 1700s. Small pox was even used as a weapon during the Revolutionary War against opponents who hadn't been innoculated against small pox (ie, the Native Americans). BTW

What? That wasn't in your high school history books? How could that be???

That, my friend, is a textbook example of genocide by European settlers upon the native populations. And a textbook example of how history is written by the victors.

...anactofgod...

At present the law subsidizes software by allowing software makers reduced liability. Hence we are saddled with bug-ridden software which is relatively expensive to operate securely.

Unfortunately the nature of the beast (complexity) exacerbates this. Writing secure code is not easy. Writing secure code that solves complex problems is less easy. (Although I would note that we're getting much better at that, the tremendous growth in software complexity is keeping system-security people busy.)

Microsoft really is (imo) the bad actor here. They have historically written systems of byzantine complexity. And they have historicaly written to proprietary interfaces. I have never looked at a proprietary interface that didn't prove to have serious security problems, ranging from DOS potential to root exploits. I am sure they exist but I've yet to encounter one in the wild.

I beleive this is because when we code thinking that we own both ends of the interface we tend to think less about possible 'what if' consequences Again, this is one of Microsoft's failings, they've always written code as if only MS would ever presume to interface to it. (Remember the smbclient cd .. command which could pop you into an MS lanman c:\drive and MS declaring that the flaw lay with a program executing 'illegal instructions'? [doh!])

Microsoft is changing its practices solely because it now *has* to. They've been determined by the courts to be a monopoly and I believe they're beginning to take that seriously. Opening their patented extensions to Kerberos is an example, Taking February to work on security issues is another. It may just be PR but it's PR which will almost certainly influence their treatment in the courts.

As software becomes ever more pervasive the costs of crack-able systems will grow higher. I for one don't ever want to be run over by a Cadillac that went out of control because its computer recieved an executable email attachment.

*Should* US (EC, jp ...) law / policy begin to put incentives on software venodors to build security into their systems? Absolutely. What approach will be used? I haven't the slightest.

I'd love to see more of the vandals and scriptkiddies being taken into custody, but I also want to see the IT industry working proactively to make their designs less vulnerable in the first place.

If Microsoft wasn't so intent on feeding software buyers email with executable attachements, the need for virus protection would be substantially reduced. It's expensive in the short term to create a solid system, it's more expensive imo to add security to fix this cr*p after the fact.

I have similar complaints regarding Zinn's A People's History of the United States. It is an interesting book but I cannot regard it as any great work of scholarship. He has a Bibliography in the back, but does not use references as I would like. He excuses himself saying (in the Bib.) "To indicate every source of information in the text would have meant a book impossibly cluttered with footnotes."

I could not disagree with him more. Also, you don't even need to use footnotes to properly indicate references. You can use endnotes between chapters or in a References section in back. It would have been helpful even if he'd indicated page numbers or even just chapters of the books in the bibliography. In my opinion, the bare minimum he could have done would be to properly reference quotations. Instead they are attributed passim, and one must search through an entire book, or even dozens of books to find if he is representing it properly.

As an experiment I looked up his very first quotation, from Columbus's log, since it was easy enough to locate. One section of it in Zinn's book (verbatim) is "Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." This makes Columbus appear to a determined slaver from the start.

But if you look at an actual text of Columbus's log, the words are all there, but Zinn's ellipses turn out to be huge. The small part I have quoted extends is apparently from log entries starting at Oct 11., and ending Oct 14. Intellectual honesty requires that you separate these off as separate quotations. Zinn misrepresents what Columbus actually wrote. I assume Zinn gathered these tidbits deliberately in order to form an apparent chain of reasoning which is not actually displayed in the log. I'm not a big fan of Columbus, but surely it is not necessary to misrepresent his writings. Zinn should have stuck to summarizing the actions of Columbus, and using coherent quotations.

Also, the parts of that specific quotation do not look half as sinister when viewing in their actual textual context. The part about servants is brought up by the natives' accounts of slavery amoung the island populations. Columbus actually brings up the part about conquering them with fifty men not as any part of a proposed project, but to say that there is no point in building a fort.

There are already enough bad things Columbus did and said without fabricating new ones.

Hey,

There's a widespread assumption in the UK, and most widespread among the Euroskeptics, that we are unequivocally better than everyone else and that their ways of doing things are worse.

That's because most 'common sense good' laws have been established by government, and hence most of what we hear of getting from europe are 'non-common-sense good' laws and 'non-good' laws.

Nobody hears from the tabloid press that 'The European Parliment has done [useful thing]'. We only get stories about people being threatened with legal action because they price thier apples by the pound, or because they sell wood measured in feet and inches.

Furthermore, The Euro has a bloody awful name. It strikes anyone that hears it as boring and unimaginitive. I mean... 'Euro'? What the fuck?

Your average Joe in the street doesn't know economics - it's not a compulsary course in schools, and not many people where I went chose to pick it up at GCSE. Resultantly, people are not aware of the numerous economic benefits. They are far more easily persuaded by flag-waving and jingoistic "There'll always be an England" attitudes.

Should we adopt the Euro? Probably. Should we be part of a 'European Super-state'? Perhaps not.

Normally I would favour a referendum on questions like the former, but sadly, I don't think that 'the man on the street' is educated enough to be objective. I think the general population should be educated in Economics, enough that they can see all sides of the Euro argument.

On the whole, though, I think the Euro could be a fairly good thing.

Michael

Watson is an American, though he was in the UK when he did the DNA work. That's why he's getting an honorary knighthood. Wouldn't do to accept homage from a foreigner. How can you be sure they'll show up for the next Viking attack?

I must admit that as a younger manager I did my fair share of crushing.

The core problem is that in a corporate (and government) environment there's always a fair bit of lying and backstabbing going on, usually at the same time.

You know the mix, two truths and one lie.

If there's some know-it-all who starts correcting me when I'm feeding this mixture to someone I have to placate/bribe to get, for example, the budget to rehire the selfsame wiseass next year, I'm going to smile, nod, and thank that person there and then, then turn around and fire his ass next day.

It would be so much nicer if the world were a better place but as it is, I have to live in it. I'm trying to change it all right but that change'll take more than my lifetime to push through.

Remember kids: even if you know how the stuff is done, you probably don't know, at 20, the reason your manager (or salesperson) is lying.

The Kyoto treaty is a slick piece of Anti-U.S. legislation that will not stop global warming.

As for blocking restrictions on international arms sale, don't forget, it was only 10 yers ago when we put up the lion's share of shutting down the world's biggest bio-war offender.

Problem is, you guys keep walking around with your stupid "peace in our time" mentality.

When will you learn, paper & talk are cheap when compared to U.S. blood'n'guts !

I believe there is a museum located in Ruedesheim, Rhine, Germany that displays some tests I might consider for a sysadmin candidate. The theory being that if they can handle these tests, then dealing with lame users and moody system will be a snap.

Copyright was originally invented by early christian Irish monks in the dark ages -

(from www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/columba-l.html
Columba went north and founded the church of Derry. Tradition has it that after founding several other monasteries, Columba copied St. Finnian's psalter without the permission of Finnian, and thus devalued the book. When Finnian took the matter to High King Dermott for judgement, Dermott judged in favor of Finnian, stating "to every cow its calf; to every book its copy" (I am borrowing this quote from Cathach Books in Dublin). Columba refused to hand over the copy, and Dermott forced the issue militarily. Columba's family and clan defeated Dermott at the battle of Cooldrevny in 561. Tradition further holds that St. Molaisi of Devenish, Columba's spiritual father, ordered Columba to bring the same number of souls to Christ that he had caused to die as pennance. In 563, Columba landed on Iona with 12 disciples, and founded a new monastery. After founding several more monasteries, confounding the local druids, and participating in another battle (this time against St. Comgall over who owned the church of Colethem), Columba died on June 9, 597.

I realize that Bruce needs to structure some sort of narrative around his article, but this "third wave" of "semantic hacking" is hardly new.

The attack on Internet Wire was just an insider abusing the system. It's been going on for quite a while, and shame on Internet Wire for having lax enough security than an ex-employee could abuse the system. Social Engineering has also been a common practice for years: call the helpdesk from the CEO's phone and demand that your password be reset. Easy stuff, old practices. In fact, social engineering, manipulation of the press, and misleading the public are practices that predate the internet by a few thousand years:

"What of this again, that these people are experts in flattery, and will commend the talk of an illiterate, or the beauty of a deformed, friend, and compare the scraggy neck of some weakling to the brawny throat of Hercules when holding up Antaeus[12] high above the earth; or go into ecstasies over a squeaky voice not more melodious than that of a cock when he pecks his spouse the hen? We, no doubt, can praise the same things that they do; but what they say is believed."
- Juvenal's Satires

What's new is that the interconnectedness of the internet community is allowing these practices to migrate to the internet in powerful ways. At least one person believes that this is cause for deep optimism:

"All the bad things we hear about the Web are true. There really are people online who'd like to lure our children into shadows. There really are hucksters who'll steal not only your money but your identity. There really are people who'll take pictures of you in a public bathroom and publish the pictures to the world. Every human vice
we can imagine finds its way onto the Web, which seems to spur the world's most lurid imaginations even further. But the reason for this should be a cause for optimism."

You can check the article out yourself for more, but I agree with the premise. The internet continuing to mirror the "real" world is generally a good thing, and the "forces of good" can harness those powers as well as the "forces of evil".

Noam Chomsky has worried quite a bit about the power of centralized press.

"Chomsky's central belief is that propaganda plays the same role in a democracy as violence plays in a dictatorship.
In the United States, therefore, you need to be less afraid of the National Guard and more afraid of the manipulation of information by governmental, corporate and academic sources. According to Chomsky, the elites who control and benefit from the American political system preserve that system by marginalizing alternative political views, selectively reporting on the consequences of United States foreign policy, and creating political apathy among the general populace by encouraging them to watch professional sports and TV sitcoms rather than actively participate in the political process."

Bruce Schneier should be less worried about manipulation of public news outlets, stock prices, and the economy by hackers, and more worried about the manipulation of public opinion by corporations and governments. Hackers, by showing people how easy it is to have their opinions manipulated, actually serve a positive purpose. I'm not saying I endorse the Internet Wire hack, real people lost money and that's not good. But, creative hacks, the "jam the WTO" movement in Seattle, cool sites like The Onion and Adbusters are all great ways to wake up an uninterested, uninvolved public.

- Twid

The Nazis also could have cared less about disabilities and social equality. Slave traders could have cared less about disabilities and social equality. I bring to your attention a trifling document called the Declaration of Independence.

Elitist regimes and dynasties come and go with the winds, but the United States government has stayed intact since its inception. This perceived need for social equality seems to have created a lasting governmental structure.

If that isn't enough, take a look at the Hungarian Declaration of Independence which looks like it was closely based on the U.S. Declaration.

Or perhaps glance at the French Constitution which notes in its first clause: "Frenchmen are equal before the law, whatever may be their titles and rank."

If you are willing to take a look at these, I might be willing to look at Schopenhauer.