While we have porn and drug sites in the USA, we can expect that censorship in China will be futile. When porn and drugs (and copyright violations) are successfully policed in the US, the Chinese will succeed in their censorship. It's the same technology.
According to repeated reports on "All Things Considered" on NPR somebody mislaid the hard drives with the HOWTO's for disarming nukes, foreign and domestic. No word on backups.
Sometimes, watching these censorship motions by a couple of entertainment cartels, I have to wonder whether their actions don't bring them under the definition of monopolistic trusts, thus making them eligible for defendant status under the Sherman Act.
If your system was compromised, your security is at fault. If, as a result of your system being compromised, you are subjected to a deflected denial of service attack, and your system buckles under the load, it's still ultimately your own poor security at fault. Now, when you take an ISP who is foolish enough to back their sysadmin to court, you could lose, because of your poor security. That said, no ISP should be likely to back the sysadmin opening up the ISP to a lawsuit.
Why expect a candidate's site to be objective? Why not expect candidates to provide interviews to neutral or even hostile sites? I suspect the "invcentor of the internet" would do better than the son of the guy who lost 12 years ago on Slashdot. Either would probably be neatly surpassed by Nader, of course, but we'll never know.
It's ironic that the descendant of bootleggers would cry for the destruction of anonymity in the nane of intellectual property. The American Revolution was fomented by smugglers, and the Industrial Revolution in this country was made possible by the deliberate abrogation of British patents.
Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the New York Times all have internet readers in China. Americans consider this a good thing, especially considering that all three of these publications are banned in China, and no ISP Chinese ISP will allow access to those sites. Proxies. The same is practical for French or Germans wanting access to Nazi memorabilia (or indeed, those Americans wanting access to their own preferred forbidden intellectual properties).
Now whethter one can actually get a valid bid in from a proxy...
I don't feel comfortable with the time scale we use to make decisions. What we should be thinking about is the long term effects of agriculture on the land. For a laboratory we can use isolated islands, and see that when we expand the human population desertification occurs. In extreme cases, without outside assistance, the population crashes with accompanying famine, plague, cannibalism etc. Easter Island is the best example. Seems it was a forest when first settled, but an oligarchy ran the place until all the trees were gone, and when there were no trees left, there was no more fishing. (The descendants of the remnants were pretty much exported by the Spanish to Peruvian silver mines). Now we have 6,000,000,000 or so people on a planet which we don't think can support a tenth of that in the long term. An all too huge part of that population haven't reached an age to add to the problem, but surely will. No parent will worry for more than their grandchildren's generation, but the damage we do with agriculture, let alone modern industrial society, doesn't show that fast. We're coping now with the decisions made in the early twentieth century, which were made to cope with the effects of the decisions made a century before. The notable thing is that until now, there was always new wilderness to tame. There's no unmapped territory left on the planet. It doesn't take prophesy to know that without a wild, uncivilized resevoir, agriculture will expand until desertification sets in. Folks, Iraq was once the Fertile Crescent, Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome. Both are better known now as desert lands, importers of food. Civilization depends on agriculture, agriculture depends on a viable ecology, and we've been taking short term advantage of practices which do not appear to work on the multi-generational time frame. Pretty natural, actually, as we've managed to civilise agricultural so that farmers won't worry more than a year ahead.
I suspect it's an age thing, Metallica's beyond my ken. (Hell, so is sound on Linux, so much for my downloading MP3's). But the banned Napster content providers are a miniscule portion of Metallica's fan base. Likely, so is that portion of Slashdot following this because they're also Metallica fans. They really can afford to piss off that portion, most of their fans don't download, and most don't care if Metallica unleashes lawyers on either Napster or its providers. But piss off 100% of their fans? I doubt they've approached 1%. Ed Craig
It seems to me that the success of Metallica's and Dr. Dre's lawsuits may be good things because of the short life of electronic physical media. When the copyrights run out, the music will be gone. In other words, the history of the recording/entertainment industry indicates that only some of today's works will survive, and much of it will likely survive only in "pirated" collections, lovingly backed up as the media changes. Because of the lack of transcription or notation in popular music, when the studios neglect to back up their copies, the music will be dead. Historians will be bemused at piercing, baggy pants, black leather, and any other aspects of early 21st century culture dependant on music. Ah well, I never loved Rap or Heavy Metal anyway.
Weird, IBM used to be to Wang (and DEC and such) as Microsoft is to Linux and various Bsd's. So if the devil has been incarnated anew in Redmond, who'd have guessed that Armonk would end up hosting more than its share of the Open Source insurgency?
Species evolution isn't about individuals. It's about the genetic drift within a population. We now have ways of influencing that drift deliberatly, and considerably less crudely than, for instance,the Third Reich's Final Solution. It's possible that nobody reading this will have grandchildren, or great grandchildren, and at that point can be considered evolutiuonary dead ends. If a readily identified elite arises then we can expect conflict when those who can't afford modification object. Faster if the modifications are visible. I'd expect the cyborgs to lose out to the genetically modified, because the geneticlly modified would be less likely to stand out. And whatever succeeds us as a species will unlikely to claim descent from most of present humanity. Well, we've exceeded the carrying capacity for this planet anyway, we are overdue for a die-off.Malthus had a point, we've only avoided a die off because our technolgy has improved. Can we maintain that, especially in agriculture?
Hmmm... The last time we embargoed the British it was humanitarian in origin (Impressment of merchant seamen counts as a humanitarian ausus belli, I think). They ended up burning damned near every city on the Eastern Seaboard. 1812 or so.
Slashdot Mirror
YMMV, but I cannot trust source code I can't see.
If I can't see the code, how am I to know it was coded as designed?
While we have porn and drug sites in the USA, we can expect that censorship in China will be futile.
When porn and drugs (and copyright violations) are successfully policed in the US, the Chinese will succeed in their censorship. It's the same technology.
According to repeated reports on "All Things Considered" on NPR somebody mislaid the hard drives with the HOWTO's for disarming nukes, foreign and domestic. No word on backups.
It was good enough for SOMEBODY to sit through twice. (Not me!)
Sometimes, watching these censorship motions by a couple of entertainment cartels, I have to wonder whether their actions don't bring them under the definition of monopolistic trusts, thus making them eligible for defendant status under the Sherman Act.
If your system was compromised, your security is at fault. If, as a result of your system being compromised, you are subjected to a deflected denial of service attack, and your system buckles under the load, it's still ultimately your own poor security at fault. Now, when you take an ISP who is foolish enough to back their sysadmin to court, you could lose, because of your poor security. That said, no ISP should be likely to back the sysadmin opening up the ISP to a lawsuit.
Why expect a candidate's site to be objective?
Why not expect candidates to provide interviews to neutral or even hostile sites? I suspect the "invcentor of the internet" would do better than the son of the guy who lost 12 years ago on Slashdot. Either would probably be neatly surpassed by Nader, of course, but we'll never know.
It's ironic that the descendant of bootleggers would cry for the destruction of anonymity in the nane of intellectual property. The American Revolution was fomented by smugglers, and the Industrial Revolution in this country was made possible by the deliberate abrogation of British patents.
Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the New York Times all have internet readers in China. Americans consider this a good thing, especially considering that all three of these publications are banned in China, and no ISP Chinese ISP will allow access to those sites. Proxies. The same is practical for French or Germans wanting access to Nazi memorabilia (or indeed, those Americans wanting access to their own preferred forbidden intellectual properties).
Now whethter one can actually get a valid bid in from a proxy...
I don't feel comfortable with the time scale we use to make decisions. What we should be thinking about is the long term effects of agriculture on the land. For a laboratory we can use isolated islands, and see that when we expand the human population desertification occurs. In extreme cases, without outside assistance, the population crashes with accompanying famine, plague, cannibalism etc.
Easter Island is the best example. Seems it was a forest when first settled, but an oligarchy ran the place until all the trees were gone, and when there were no trees left, there was no more fishing. (The descendants of the remnants were pretty much exported by the Spanish to Peruvian silver mines).
Now we have 6,000,000,000 or so people on a planet which we don't think can support a tenth of that in the long term. An all too huge part of that population haven't reached an age to add to the problem, but surely will. No parent will worry for more than their grandchildren's generation, but the damage we do with agriculture, let alone modern industrial society, doesn't show that fast.
We're coping now with the decisions made in the early twentieth century, which were made to cope with the effects of the decisions made a century before. The notable thing is that until now, there was always new wilderness to tame. There's no unmapped territory left on the planet. It doesn't take prophesy to know that without a wild, uncivilized resevoir, agriculture will expand until desertification sets in. Folks, Iraq was once the Fertile Crescent, Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome. Both are better known now as desert lands, importers of food.
Civilization depends on agriculture, agriculture depends on a viable ecology, and we've been taking short term advantage of practices which do not appear to work on the multi-generational time frame. Pretty natural, actually, as we've managed to civilise agricultural so that farmers won't worry more than a year ahead.
I suspect it's an age thing, Metallica's beyond my ken. (Hell, so is sound on Linux, so much for my downloading MP3's).
But the banned Napster content providers are a miniscule portion of Metallica's fan base. Likely, so is that portion of Slashdot following this because they're also Metallica fans. They really can afford to piss off that portion, most of their fans don't download, and most don't care if Metallica unleashes lawyers on either Napster or its providers.
But piss off 100% of their fans? I doubt they've approached 1%.
Ed Craig
It seems to me that the success of Metallica's and Dr. Dre's lawsuits may be good things because of the short life of electronic physical media. When the copyrights run out, the music will be gone.
In other words, the history of the recording/entertainment industry indicates that only some of today's works will survive, and much of it will likely survive only in "pirated" collections, lovingly backed up as the media changes.
Because of the lack of transcription or notation in popular music, when the studios neglect to back up their copies, the music will be dead. Historians will be bemused at piercing, baggy pants, black leather, and any other aspects of early 21st century culture dependant on music.
Ah well, I never loved Rap or Heavy Metal anyway.
Weird, IBM used to be to Wang (and DEC and such) as Microsoft is to Linux and various Bsd's. So if the devil has been incarnated anew in Redmond, who'd have guessed that Armonk would end up hosting more than its share of the Open Source insurgency?
Species evolution isn't about individuals. It's about the genetic drift within a population. We now have ways of influencing that drift deliberatly, and considerably less crudely than, for instance,the Third Reich's Final Solution. It's possible that nobody reading this will have grandchildren, or great grandchildren, and at that point can be considered evolutiuonary dead ends. If a readily identified elite arises then we can expect conflict when those who can't afford modification object. Faster if the modifications are visible. I'd expect the cyborgs to lose out to the genetically modified, because the geneticlly modified would be less likely to stand out. And whatever succeeds us as a species will unlikely to claim descent from most of present humanity. Well, we've exceeded the carrying capacity for this planet anyway, we are overdue for a die-off.Malthus had a point, we've only avoided a die off because our technolgy has improved. Can we maintain that, especially in agriculture?
Hmmm... The last time we embargoed the British it was humanitarian in origin (Impressment of merchant seamen counts as a humanitarian ausus belli, I think). They ended up burning damned near every city on the Eastern Seaboard. 1812 or so.
I've never seen a better reason for reducing legal costs. Currently, unfortunatly, it's cheaper to hire a hitman than a lawyer.