Slashdot Mirror

A google.com search on "einstein's wife" turns up a number of hits and books, including this or this or here. None can really doubt that Einstein wasn't brilliant, but perhaps at least one woman was also not too shabby?

Yeah, that quote caught my eye too. I did a Google search and found this. And I suppose GB Sr. never figured out how he lost to Clinton...

"Picture 1980. Ted Nelson is running around with his Xanadu guys: Roger Gregory, H. Keith Henson (now waging war against the Scientologists) and K. Eric Drexler, later to build the Foresight Institute. They dream of creating what is to become the World Wide Web. Nowadays guys at hacker cons might dress like vampires. In 1980 they wear identical black baseball caps with silver wings and the slogan: 'Xanadu: wings of the mind.'"

1994-current. Work continues on the second XOC fine-grain hyper-sharin transpublishing server, under Roger Gregory and Keith Henson.

o In 1992, the Church of Scientology had become the first religious organization in Canada to be convicted of criminal conduct. Specifically, stealing documents from law firms, public associations and government entities -- and breach of trust. In addition, in the Casey Hill litigation, Scientology was ordered to pay millions of dollars to Canadian lawyer, Casey Hill, for slandering his reputation.

"Picture 1980. Ted Nelson is running around with his Xanadu guys: Roger Gregory, H. Keith Henson (now waging war against the Scientologists) and K. Eric Drexler, later to build the Foresight Institute. They dream of creating what is to become the World Wide Web. Nowadays guys at hacker cons might dress like vampires. In 1980 they wear identical black baseball caps with silver wings and the slogan: 'Xanadu: wings of the mind.'"

1994-current. Work continues on the second XOC fine-grain hyper-sharin transpublishing server, under Roger Gregory and Keith Henson.

o In 1992, the Church of Scientology had become the first religious organization in Canada to be convicted of criminal conduct. Specifically, stealing documents from law firms, public associations and government entities -- and breach of trust. In addition, in the Casey Hill litigation, Scientology was ordered to pay millions of dollars to Canadian lawyer, Casey Hill, for slandering his reputation.

but I have the strange feeling I'm only getting 1/2 the story here.

I feel that way with almost anything Jamie posts. His writing is so completely one-sided that my natural inclination is to assume he's wrong. Even though I've thought for years that Scientology was sinister and repugnant, my first guess was that this guy must have been a kook. It wasn't until I read some of Keith Henson's postings that I thought Jamie might actually be right.

Really, I'm happy for people to post opinion pieces, but these jumbled mixes of news story and opinion piece just read like propaganda.

The problem with this is that Senator Hatch _is not_ representing the public interest in his dealings, but rather special interests _just like_ those of scientologists. In fact, when France was investigating scientologist's legal terroism tactics, he defended them.

He is responsible for the CTEA (written by Hatch). More here.

He co-authored the DMCA that's making slashdot fold. More here.

He's also responsible for this juicy piece

You can count on only one thing from this politician.

These claims are objectively testable, but Dianeticians do not
either try to validate them or retract them. When faced with
criticism that these claims are a pack of lies, they try to claim the
criticism is a result of a conspiracy. This is anti-scientific.

Psychiatry is a broad church, with many competing ideas on how to
best treat patients. I don't think the ideas involved in the early
dianetics were whackier than some in the psychological mainstream, but
what differentiates dianetics and scientology is its secrecy and
hostility to criticism.

Just how is something like this different from any other form of vigilanteism? The "doctrine of necessity" can justify this?

In the case of a bank or other entity answerable to its shareholders, creating a panic could result in a massive class-action shareholders suit. With such money at stake, it is not surprising there are those willing to take "direct action" against a hacker or hackers. I have even heard rumors of such extreme actions as sending goon squads armed with baseball bats to confiscate computers and demand silence.

I for one would not be amused were someone to send out bogus emails with my name on them.

I wasn't either, myself, when forged messages containing racist and Neo-NAZI materials were forged in my name.

I would not consider it reasonable to mount a DoS attack on the spammer but certainly would be after them with all the legal force my meager resources could bring to bear.

The case I'm referring to, where I resorted to possibly-illegal DoS attacks, was the case of Scientology's forged spam of alt.religion.scientology. This was perhaps the worst and most prolonged spam in history, and all the spam was forged in the names of posters to the newsgroup, at first with NAZI materials culled from racist newsgroups.

It took electronic tracking by normal spam-hunting means, the use of private investigators and the interest of the FBI to stop that, though nobody was prosecuted. The page I cited lists the ISPs abused, some of which were effectively knocked off the net by the hijacking. The "sporgery" (spammed forgery) used dialup ISP accounts paid for by money orders with fake info, hijacked Wingates on @home.com, open news servers, even once a router for ham-based packet radio! The cable modem spam hit thousands of posts an hour.

When attacks become extreme and unstoppable by ordinary means, and law enforcement won't do anything, people will resort to extraordinary means. (I stopped the DOS when it merely caused the sporgers to hop from IP to IP faster, which made it more difficult to filter.)

Fox' experiment produced not only amino acids, but simple proteins and basic cellular structures. That's right -- cells. Were they alive? Who knows. But I've done the experiment myself, in his lab, with his help, and it's dirt easy, and it produces great results.

He called the cells "proteinoid microspheres", and they followed some parameters for living things -- metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, etc. That might or might not mean anything -- fire has the same properties after all -- but it certainly felt like Fox was on the right track. So much so in fact that he had the opportunity to present his results before the Pope on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, Dr Fox died a couple of years ago and no one ever really learned about his work. Too bad.

For more on Dr Fox, take a look here (an article) and here (a thumbnail biography).

Anyhow, the point of bringing all this up is that this research really isn't anything new -- just the synthesis of several modern trends that would have happened sooner or later regardless, like cloning.

I've happened on this site before, it may have been posted to memepool or something similar. There was a lot of information on Scientology that Scientologists wouldn't find too flattering. A lot of it seemed so paranoid to me that I hoped it wasn't true, such as a list of ex-scientologists who later turned detractors and also later met an untimely demise. Given the rabid nature of a lot of the scientologists defending their cult I wouldn't be so sure however.

I don't see this as anything different than a review or expose however. This is no different than if George Lucas went after any bad Star Wars: The Phantom Menace reviews and had them yanked because they referred to LucasFilms or ILM's trademarks. For that matter its no different than if restraunts threatened legal action over poor restraunt reviews (or poor health department ratings).

What's so amazing to me is how incredibly stupid the scientologists and their lawyers are. There's a page that says all kinds of unfavourable things about them, the least of which is that they bully people who don't agree with scientology, and they bully them into being shut down. Nothing like providing proof of peoples opinions of you.

For a 20/20 expose on Scientology go here, here, here or just click this for a Google search

The dangerous thing about this as far as rights go is that while many think of the internet as the last bastion of freedom its really not even close. ISP's routinely take the easy way out when faced with any legal action or even public pressure.

2000 a month ? Look up the sporge in alt.religion.scientology.

There were times they were passing that a *day*, all because the Church didn't like the conversation that was going on. And this wasn't a one off, this has been going on for years. (Although it has been strangly quiet for the last month. Quiet being a relative term, of course)

Machine generated forgeries are a recent appearance, mainly hitting ars and the admin groups. No more, do we see the hand-crafted post, it's more and more the random gibberish and chargen output.

Clever trolls and stirrers have a place in Usenet - indeed, that is the main amusement I get from it now. The truely abrasive ones are the ones that end in my score file, and can be sorely missed by everyone when they leave (witness the recent death of Cronan Thompson in rec.arts.sf.* - even the Trek Fans miss him now))

It's the boring ones that we need to do away with. The net.kooks of old are no-more, and there is no-one fitting to take their place. And the internet is much the poorer for it.

http://holysmoke.org/forgeries/forged.htm for the ARS stuff