Many of the broods don't overlap geographically. There are small broods that emerge a little ahead or behind the main emergence, but I think the article is referring to geographically distinct broods which emerge at different times.
Here in Kansas the last big emergence was in 1998. We won't see another emergence until 2015. We may get a small number of 17 year cicada (genus Magicicada), but most of what we'll see is normal, boring, dog day cicadas (genus Tibicen).
The same is true of New Jersey. There seem to be four broods of 17 year Magicicada which occur in NJ. There are also Tibicen which emerge annually.
Not quite. There are annual cicadas which we always have. Every 17 years a brood of 17 year cicadas (different genus) emerge. There are tons of them all at once. Many times more than you'd see normally. This will be a loud summer for the Middle Atlantic and Central Midwest.
But how does a lightning strike at Niagara knock out power in at least 6 states? Why didn't the grid isolate the failure and provide some surplus power to areas normally served by that generator? Why did NYC, which has it's own power stations in the city, as well as a nuclear plant nearby, lose power (and why are the lights back on when I look across the river)?
"Senate Democrats are not bringing any of Bush's appointments to a full Senate vote."
Which continues the 6 year Republican tradition of never bringing Clinton nominees to a vote. Of course, they rarely even brought them to a committee vote.
The 1040 is not as bad as I think it once was, so maybe this just means that the IRS has done a good job, not that EULAs are that bad. Speaking for myself, I've never felt like they were totally unreadable, and I usually do read them before clicking.
Following up on another post's request that you get your facts straight: CO2 levels have more than doubled since the Industrial revolution, a rate faster than that observed in any other time period. There is no explanation but human activities, especially since cars and coal, oil, and natural gas power plants all release CO2.
Temperate climates in Antarctica are because the land mass under the Antarctic ice moved via plate tectonics from more equatorial areas to the pole.
Yes, the earth's temperature has fluctuated, as have CO2 levels, but never so fast, and never as a result of one species' actions.
I've been thinking lately that the big download sites ought to put their stuff up on gnutella or some other popular P2P network. Then just distribute an md5sum in their announcements, and everyone who obtains the file automatically becomes a mirror.
Their ftp site could contain only a gpg signature of the file, rather than just the file.
I'm sure there is a reason this is a stupid idea, but I haven't thought of it.
Re:Time to get learned. Which package do we get?
on
Blaming Encryption
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· Score: 1
But the original poster wanted to be able to use it after it became contraband. PGP/GPG lose their main value without the keyservers providing a web of trust. They can be used for symmetric encryption, and the web of trust can be left out, but I wonder if there is some better solution for a context in which the public key infrastructure we're used to gets shut down for providing illegal cryptographic material.
With a warrant, the police could intercept and read a letter. Similarly, an email should only be intercepted if it is covered by a specific warrant. And wiretap doesn't require that the sender or reciever approve if there is a court order, and that court order could also compell to the carrier to provide access, if not assistance.
The problem is that this doesn't address the fact that a sensible word substitution code, or steganography - as suggested by other posters - is an option in email and snail mail, and no law can force author to avoid ambiguous phrases, such as, "Do the thing tomorrow." The problem is not that laws would be extended for email in ways they do not apply in other contexts, but that freedoms normally allowed in any context are being threatened for little to no net benefit.
But pgp could be undermined if the Feds simply shut down the keyservers. By destroying the web of trust, the broad utility of PGP would be undermined.
Of course a terrorist could still use it, since they could transfer the keys securely.
But if that's the case, why not use a one time pad, which would have the advantage of looking like completely random data, and could never be proven to have been encrypted.
He wants to "tax things we don't like." Clearly capital gains are included. I suspect his argument would be that the stock market is about corporate power, and he dislikes the influence of corporations in public policy and in national activities.
This was raised in a context of progressive taxes, in which the concept is that the more you earn, the higher your tax rate. So your point about the wealth the stock market created is the same one he would make in favor of his taxes.
Most people recognize that various aspects of the Constitution reflect it's 18th c. origin, and don't get their panties in a hitch about using more modern methods or terms. If statistical sampling in demographics was practiced before the 1800s, they would have been clearer.
Most people who make these picky arguments are pretty free in how they interpret reference to militias in the 2nd amendment.
The loss of genetic diversity in Cheetahs is a perfect example of the problem the original poster was referring to. When their range was large, they had genetic variablility. As they were hunted and their habitat destroyed, the genetic variability dropped because of inbreeding. Now the main activity in their conservation is planning matings of cheetahs to ensure that the variability that exists is preserved and increased.
The low genetic variability means that infants get sick and die, and that if a disease gets into the population, it'll be almost impossible to save any of them.
I was reading through comments hoping someone would say this so I didn't have to.
Not all gynecologists or obstetricians perform abortions. Looking in a yellow pages for abortion won't give you the name of every doctor who performs abortions. This web site does so in a unified and public way.
Napster allows people to copy other people's files. That may or may not be illegal, depending on the file, the author's permissions, the file's owner's consent, etc. This site incites people to commit murder, which is always illegal. By crossing names off, it provides a sort of reward to the people who commit these crimes.
This isn't about the speech on the site. They can criticize these doctors and their actions without demanding that the doctors be killed.
To paraphrase, this site's right to swing its fist ends at these doctors' noses.
This is silly. If you have an email address, let me know. Your arguments are increasingly weird, and I think we should take this off-line.
On one hand, the AFSC should be carefully watched because you, Mr. Anonymous Coward, think that a pacifist organization will become terrorists. At the same time, a man you agree threatened the safety of the president as person and as a political office is OK because you, Mr. AC, know that he "is a loyal American and honorable man."
Loyal Americans don't threaten to kill the president. Honorable men respect that people disagree, and don't threaten to harm those they disagree with. You agree that he made a threat. If he said it, how exactly is it libel? Setting aside that he, as a public figure, can't sue for libel.
The constitution doesn't say that congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech unless an Anonymous Coward or the FBI thinks that speech could eventually maybe lead to revolution. The first amendment says (care of Project Gutenberg):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Prying into people's lives because they choose to freely peacably assemble with the intention of speaking freely violates the fourth amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
To choose an example at random, Eistein's records were collected because he belonged to a number of communist groups. The only revolution he caused was within physics. His rights were violated. The FBI, to quote you, "swung the arm of militant action such that it impacted the sacred nose of his liberties." His liberties, as enumerated above, were impacted by FBI agents sticking their noses into his legal actions. He didn't swing the fist, they did.
I know I've been trolled, hook, line, and sinker, but I can't stop now.
Bernie Sanders has represented New Hampshire since 1991. A republican was president then. My only real reply to the rest of this is that right above that great second amendment is one that talks about the congress not passing laws that restrict the rights of citizens to express their views. The FBI watched these leftists because they were leftists, not because they were revolutionaries.
You have yet to explain how the AFSC or the Quakers (noted pacifists) are terrorists.
This is disingenuous. You know quite well that not all "views that diverge from the mainstream" are identical. If I fire a gun into the ground, that is harmless; if I were to fire a gun into the body of an innocent bystander, that would be a crime. Both acts involve the firing of a gun, but they are not identical. So it is with "holding views".
Furthermore, none of these leftists are accused merely of holding views -- that alone could be tolerated in a free society, no matter how psychopathic the views may be -- no, the problem is that they acted on those views, and actively proselytized them. And in the case of such views as theirs, there is no good reason for the nation to allow itself to be damaged by such behavior.
Disingenuous my eye. It's trite, but so clear. My right to swing my fist ends at your nose. No one suggests that firing ranges are per se illegal, while drive-by shootings are. How can expressing your views do harm? The constitution places the right to free expression at the top of the rights enumerated. Along with the right to choose a religion that may differ from Luther's perspective on Christianity.
It is therefore impossible that Congress could create an agency with the power to invade privacy using a citizen's expressed beliefs as their only justification.
As for "B-1" Bob Barr, I don't have 7 year old clippings around, so the exact quote escapes me, but after Clinton was elected, he commented that the president should be careful coming to Georgia, because there's a big military presence there, and they might not like him. I saw a follow up where someone asked the Secret Service to look into that, and they said they questioned him, and were watching out.
As a point of fact, treason is the act of making war on the government. Saying "I plan to lead a coup" is not treason. This is that same distinction between speech and action. It's only revolution when you start shooting. The weather underground did, the AFSC didn't.
When did being left wing become illegal? Did you know there's a socialist congressman? Not only are his thoughts legal, but the state of New Hampshire consistently sends him to represent their interests. He probably supports lifting sanctions on Iraq, and the UN, and the AFSC. This is legal. The he doesn't threaten the government, he is it. For that alone, should the government compile a file on him? NO. For the same reason that, until the folks at Ruby Ridge started collecting illegal weapons, the FBI shouldn't have had a file on them. After, it was in the interest of public safety and law enforcement to watch them.
Look down the list: William Faulkner, Bertoldt Brecht, the American Friends' Service Committee. They're all leftists. Are you people seriously trying to claim that it is not the role of the FBI to keep tabs on people who are fundamentally at war with the United States? Hello?! These files are relics of a nearly-forgotten time when the FBI defended this nation. The FBI you see through these files is not the degenerate radical group now laboring to abolish the sacred liberties for the sake of which our nation was founded.
I know this is a troll. The illogic of saying that the FBI that invaded law abiding citizens' privacy in the 60's is not the same as the FBI that does that now makes no sense.
Being a radical leftist isn't illegal. Holding views that diverge from that of the mainstream is not illegal. Martin Luther King, Jr. may have violated adultery laws, but not federal laws. The files the FBI collected on him were not related to illegal activities, but to legal activities related to free speech.
That the Quakers do not believe in justification by faith alone just means that they aren't Lutheran. This is not the most common Christian belief. It was Luther's rebellion.
I know I just got trolled, but someone moderated this as interesting, rather than Funny, so I had to speak up.
I'm a leftist. I am not at war with the US. I thought that the right-wing coup that was staged is worse than anything Brecht ever did. Did you know that Bob Barr, one of the impeachment managers, has threatened to kill the president, and has threatened to lead an armed coup? This man has a Secret Service file for a reason.
PS. J. Edgar Hoover (on the list) was not a leftist.
Fine, but I don't want to run a different OS. I see no reason to splinter things to get this little thing when it should be easy to get minimal support for this in existing systems.
Java has all these nice things because people wrote it for Java and it standardized. Why not do that on Linux, or in Gnome or KDE, and give existing systems the same advantages that an OS written from scratch in Java might have, and that MacOS and MacOSX have now.
In other words, it looks like duplication of effort to write a new OS just to get XML parsing cheaply. I don't object to writing new OSes, but I'd need better reasons than native XML processing to switch. Microsoft's lawyers not withstanding, I think that functionality can and should live in user-space.
In short, I had checked post 20 out, and while it asked similar questions, I didn't think it gave an answer, or lead towards an answer that I was looking for.
Bundles are an elegant compromise between the necessity of having a bunch of files together to run a single application while at the same time giving a convenient single box to be handled from outside. Average users will use the box as a whole, advanced users can open it up and play with the contents. This is another feature that Linux needs to come up with some equivalent for, if it is to succeed on the desktop.
I agree. Is anyone thinking about implementing anything like this in Linux? It seems like as Linux moves to the desktop and to a graphical desktop in particular, bundles are key. Application files could have configuration data attached to the bundle, image files could store previews, and application bindings could be handled in a clear way without obscure registries.
Are GNOME or KDE working on this at all? Could GNUstep support this scheme?
There is *nothing* *anyone* can do to stop the large money'd interests taking away our freedoms, short of cough up more money. Our system is run by money, the only votes that count are green and have George Washington (or preferably Benjamin Franklin)'s face on them. That's not going to change. It's never been any different.
Corporations didn't exist in the US until the civil war, and the Founding Fathers were very opposed to them. The reason they opposed them is the same as the reason people oppose them now: there is no moral system they can be held accountable to. The law applies to them, and gives them rights like citizens, but the ways that they can be punished are limited because they aren't people. Right now it is correct to say that the only votes that count are green, because you can't incarcerate a corporation, or execute it, or make it do community service. Corporations are legal entities, organized as corporations under state laws. They exist as legal entities only, therefore the revolution you suggest is a legal one. Encourage your legal representatives on a national and state level to make laws regulating corporate behavior carry meaningful penalties.
So what do we do? I don't know. I'm tempted to advocate "open revolution" (whatever the fuck that means) at this point, but if you cut the head off a new one will just grow back in its place.
The problem now is that it is impossible to rebel against the corporations themselves. For instance, one cannot buy a car that isn't made by a huge multinational corporation. Most food comes from large agro-businesses, and large companies control most news outlets, computer makers, tv shows, etc. One must inevitably buy from a company that is part of a huge conglomerate.
Most major change of the kind we want isn't initiated by people statedly trying to make a change. Large change comes by accident, not by design (all hail Eris). On that note, we should keep doing what we do well: write free software. "Fate" will take care of the rest, is already starting to in fact:)
Margaret Mead says, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world, indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Free software won't make Nike pay workers a living wage, nor will it keep GE from dumping toxins in your reservoir. A legal revolution will. No matter how great Linux is, it won't make Amazon.com stop trying to patent one-click shopping. Linux will change things, but not those. That change will come from you writing a snail-mail letter to everyone in congress, everyone on the supreme court, and everyone in the White House, telling them that things have to change.
Then write to every candidate for public office and ask them for their position on these reforms. Don't vote for anyone who thinks things are fine. Don't vote for anyone who votes against campaign finance reform, or who is too afraid to answer your questions.
When enough people do that, it's an open revolution.
I wondered about this also, because I've been thinking that a word processor that used pdf as a native format might be really nice. Most people can read pdf files, so it's more portable than ms word, or even PS. Why not have a program that works a little like lyx, but just draws pdf to the screen?
I thought of this because when I'm writing in (La)TeX, I usually have a gv window displaying the file I'm editing. It seems like it ought to be a small step to move from having three windows (emacs, gv, xterm to run for file; do latex $i; dvips $i;done). What's to prevent mixing the emacs part and the gv part.
Rendering the document would be free, since pdf viewing code exists already, and dps is supposed to just let you put ps on a screen. So all that you need is a way to enter text in the file in a WYSIWYG way, and process it easily into PDF or PS.
The processing could be through a tex backend, or something, so you just need to be able to enter the text. How easy would it be to tweak gv to make entering text possible, as a sort of proof of concept?
Wouldn't resealing this document mean instituting prior restraint? This is what the Pentagon Papers were all about, and the Cigarrette papers. In an article in the Nation they talk about a case where the University of California won a suit over documents from a tobacco company because they had published the documents on a CD and the Web. This case should be a precedent that publication on a web site should mean that the documents are public, and not secret.
DeCSS is based on material that was not encrypted, and was available for public scrutiny. At worst, they violated copyright. The supposed trade secret was not a secret because of oversight by licensed users. It strikes me that this case has numerous parallels with the Cigarrette Papers case, which was also in California.
Perhaps a lawyer familiar with the Cigarrette Papers case can tell me why that case did not set precedent.
My cell biology text says that a clone is "a population of organisms derived from a single ancestor and therefore homogeneous." Which is to say, a population in which all individuals have no genetic difference.
Cloning doesn't require that the original cells not be eggs. It is certainly true that the achievement is minor, since it imitates normal biological events that occur when producing identical twins.
What made Dolly neat was that they made a clone from a cell that had differentiated and was therefore in theory incapable of producing anything other than udder cells. Dolly is no more or less a clone than this monkey, and I bet that more monkeys survive this kind of cloning than would if they cloned skin cells.
Since so many monkeys are endangered, it isn't surprising that they want to be able to clone them, and this is cheaper and easier than what they did for Dolly.
Well, they won't be patening the gene itself, however the process by which it is created.
The process of creating a gene is included in the patent(s) for PCR technology, and things like that. The gene patents are (I believe) on uses of a gene. So an antifreeze gene from a fish gets patented as a way to make crops resistant to frost.
In other words, the technology to reproduce and manipulate genes is already patented and has been for some time. This technology is not gene specific, so one wouldn't even file an extension to that original patent as new genes are discovered. What individual genes get patented for is their particular use.
One case I could imagine where I would be wrong would be for DNA primers for PCR.
What PCR does, is it takes a DNA sample, and it unzips the DNA, and special sequences of DNA attach to the part of the DNA you want, and the gene gets copied, unzipped, and copied again. Most gene cloning works like that. I imagine one could patent that primer, which is a small chunk of DNA, but I haven't heard of anyone doing so.
But by splitting the OS from applications, the APIs must open.
Right now they can be closed APIs because the only developers they need are internal. If the only people writing programs are in other companies, then the communication between those companies must be through more open channels. At least they would have to make that collaboration publicly known. Then the government could regulate that interaction, and oblige the companies to offer information equally to all competitors.
Now, MS could transfer one programmer from systems to applications, and with him or her, all of the information on API that the Office team needs to make their program works. Without the government micromanaging the company, there is no way for them to regulate that now.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the broods don't overlap geographically. There are small broods that emerge a little ahead or behind the main emergence, but I think the article is referring to geographically distinct broods which emerge at different times.
Here in Kansas the last big emergence was in 1998. We won't see another emergence until 2015. We may get a small number of 17 year cicada (genus Magicicada), but most of what we'll see is normal, boring, dog day cicadas (genus Tibicen).
The same is true of New Jersey. There seem to be four broods of 17 year Magicicada which occur in NJ. There are also Tibicen which emerge annually.
Not quite. There are annual cicadas which we always have. Every 17 years a brood of 17 year cicadas (different genus) emerge. There are tons of them all at once. Many times more than you'd see normally. This will be a loud summer for the Middle Atlantic and Central Midwest.
But how does a lightning strike at Niagara knock out power in at least 6 states? Why didn't the grid isolate the failure and provide some surplus power to areas normally served by that generator? Why did NYC, which has it's own power stations in the city, as well as a nuclear plant nearby, lose power (and why are the lights back on when I look across the river)?
"Senate Democrats are not bringing any of Bush's appointments to a full Senate vote."
Which continues the 6 year Republican tradition of never bringing Clinton nominees to a vote. Of course, they rarely even brought them to a committee vote.
What's good for the goose...
The 1040 is not as bad as I think it once was, so maybe this just means that the IRS has done a good job, not that EULAs are that bad. Speaking for myself, I've never felt like they were totally unreadable, and I usually do read them before clicking.
BTW, IANAL.
Following up on another post's request that you get your facts straight:
CO2 levels have more than doubled since the Industrial revolution, a rate faster than that observed in any other time period. There is no explanation but human activities, especially since cars and coal, oil, and natural gas power plants all release CO2.
Temperate climates in Antarctica are because the land mass under the Antarctic ice moved via plate tectonics from more equatorial areas to the pole.
Yes, the earth's temperature has fluctuated, as have CO2 levels, but never so fast, and never as a result of one species' actions.
I've been thinking lately that the big download sites ought to put their stuff up on gnutella or some other popular P2P network. Then just distribute an md5sum in their announcements, and everyone who obtains the file automatically becomes a mirror.
Their ftp site could contain only a gpg signature of the file, rather than just the file.
I'm sure there is a reason this is a stupid idea, but I haven't thought of it.
But the original poster wanted to be able to use it after it became contraband. PGP/GPG lose their main value without the keyservers providing a web of trust. They can be used for symmetric encryption, and the web of trust can be left out, but I wonder if there is some better solution for a context in which the public key infrastructure we're used to gets shut down for providing illegal cryptographic material.
With a warrant, the police could intercept and read a letter. Similarly, an email should only be intercepted if it is covered by a specific warrant. And wiretap doesn't require that the sender or reciever approve if there is a court order, and that court order could also compell to the carrier to provide access, if not assistance.
The problem is that this doesn't address the fact that a sensible word substitution code, or steganography - as suggested by other posters - is an option in email and snail mail, and no law can force author to avoid ambiguous phrases, such as, "Do the thing tomorrow." The problem is not that laws would be extended for email in ways they do not apply in other contexts, but that freedoms normally allowed in any context are being threatened for little to no net benefit.
But pgp could be undermined if the Feds simply shut down the keyservers. By destroying the web of trust, the broad utility of PGP would be undermined.
Of course a terrorist could still use it, since they could transfer the keys securely.
But if that's the case, why not use a one time pad, which would have the advantage of looking like completely random data, and could never be proven to have been encrypted.
He wants to "tax things we don't like." Clearly capital gains are included. I suspect his argument would be that the stock market is about corporate power, and he dislikes the influence of corporations in public policy and in national activities.
This was raised in a context of progressive taxes, in which the concept is that the more you earn, the higher your tax rate. So your point about the wealth the stock market created is the same one he would make in favor of his taxes.
Politics are funny.
But statistical technique didn't exist in 1789.
Most people recognize that various aspects of the Constitution reflect it's 18th c. origin, and don't get their panties in a hitch about using more modern methods or terms. If statistical sampling in demographics was practiced before the 1800s, they would have been clearer.
Most people who make these picky arguments are pretty free in how they interpret reference to militias in the 2nd amendment.
The loss of genetic diversity in Cheetahs is a perfect example of the problem the original poster was referring to. When their range was large, they had genetic variablility. As they were hunted and their habitat destroyed, the genetic variability dropped because of inbreeding. Now the main activity in their conservation is planning matings of cheetahs to ensure that the variability that exists is preserved and increased.
The low genetic variability means that infants get sick and die, and that if a disease gets into the population, it'll be almost impossible to save any of them.
I was reading through comments hoping someone would say this so I didn't have to.
Not all gynecologists or obstetricians perform abortions. Looking in a yellow pages for abortion won't give you the name of every doctor who performs abortions. This web site does so in a unified and public way.
Napster allows people to copy other people's files. That may or may not be illegal, depending on the file, the author's permissions, the file's owner's consent, etc. This site incites people to commit murder, which is always illegal. By crossing names off, it provides a sort of reward to the people who commit these crimes.
This isn't about the speech on the site. They can criticize these doctors and their actions without demanding that the doctors be killed.
To paraphrase, this site's right to swing its fist ends at these doctors' noses.
Josh
On one hand, the AFSC should be carefully watched because you, Mr. Anonymous Coward, think that a pacifist organization will become terrorists. At the same time, a man you agree threatened the safety of the president as person and as a political office is OK because you, Mr. AC, know that he "is a loyal American and honorable man."
Loyal Americans don't threaten to kill the president. Honorable men respect that people disagree, and don't threaten to harm those they disagree with. You agree that he made a threat. If he said it, how exactly is it libel? Setting aside that he, as a public figure, can't sue for libel.
The constitution doesn't say that congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech unless an Anonymous Coward or the FBI thinks that speech could eventually maybe lead to revolution. The first amendment says (care of Project Gutenberg):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Prying into people's lives because they choose to freely peacably assemble with the intention of speaking freely violates the fourth amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
To choose an example at random, Eistein's records were collected because he belonged to a number of communist groups. The only revolution he caused was within physics. His rights were violated. The FBI, to quote you, "swung the arm of militant action such that it impacted the sacred nose of his liberties." His liberties, as enumerated above, were impacted by FBI agents sticking their noses into his legal actions. He didn't swing the fist, they did.
I know I've been trolled, hook, line, and sinker, but I can't stop now.
You have yet to explain how the AFSC or the Quakers (noted pacifists) are terrorists.
This is disingenuous. You know quite well that not all "views that diverge from the mainstream" are identical. If I fire a gun into the ground, that is harmless; if I were to fire a gun into the body of an innocent bystander, that would be a crime. Both acts involve the firing of a gun, but they are not identical. So it is with "holding views".
Furthermore, none of these leftists are accused merely of holding views -- that alone could be tolerated in a free society, no matter how psychopathic the views may be -- no, the problem is that they acted on those views, and actively proselytized them. And in the case of such views as theirs, there is no good reason for the nation to allow itself to be damaged by such behavior.
Disingenuous my eye. It's trite, but so clear. My right to swing my fist ends at your nose. No one suggests that firing ranges are per se illegal, while drive-by shootings are. How can expressing your views do harm? The constitution places the right to free expression at the top of the rights enumerated. Along with the right to choose a religion that may differ from Luther's perspective on Christianity.
It is therefore impossible that Congress could create an agency with the power to invade privacy using a citizen's expressed beliefs as their only justification.
As for "B-1" Bob Barr, I don't have 7 year old clippings around, so the exact quote escapes me, but after Clinton was elected, he commented that the president should be careful coming to Georgia, because there's a big military presence there, and they might not like him. I saw a follow up where someone asked the Secret Service to look into that, and they said they questioned him, and were watching out.
As a point of fact, treason is the act of making war on the government. Saying "I plan to lead a coup" is not treason. This is that same distinction between speech and action. It's only revolution when you start shooting. The weather underground did, the AFSC didn't.
Look down the list: William Faulkner, Bertoldt Brecht, the American Friends' Service Committee. They're all leftists. Are you people seriously trying to claim that it is not the role of the FBI to keep tabs on people who are fundamentally at war with the United States? Hello?! These files are relics of a nearly-forgotten time when the FBI defended this nation. The FBI you see through these files is not the degenerate radical group now laboring to abolish the sacred liberties for the sake of which our nation was founded.
I know this is a troll. The illogic of saying that the FBI that invaded law abiding citizens' privacy in the 60's is not the same as the FBI that does that now makes no sense.
Being a radical leftist isn't illegal. Holding views that diverge from that of the mainstream is not illegal. Martin Luther King, Jr. may have violated adultery laws, but not federal laws. The files the FBI collected on him were not related to illegal activities, but to legal activities related to free speech.
That the Quakers do not believe in justification by faith alone just means that they aren't Lutheran. This is not the most common Christian belief. It was Luther's rebellion.
I know I just got trolled, but someone moderated this as interesting, rather than Funny, so I had to speak up.
I'm a leftist. I am not at war with the US. I thought that the right-wing coup that was staged is worse than anything Brecht ever did. Did you know that Bob Barr, one of the impeachment managers, has threatened to kill the president, and has threatened to lead an armed coup? This man has a Secret Service file for a reason.
PS. J. Edgar Hoover (on the list) was not a leftist.
Fine, but I don't want to run a different OS. I see no reason to splinter things to get this little thing when it should be easy to get minimal support for this in existing systems.
Java has all these nice things because people wrote it for Java and it standardized. Why not do that on Linux, or in Gnome or KDE, and give existing systems the same advantages that an OS written from scratch in Java might have, and that MacOS and MacOSX have now.
In other words, it looks like duplication of effort to write a new OS just to get XML parsing cheaply. I don't object to writing new OSes, but I'd need better reasons than native XML processing to switch. Microsoft's lawyers not withstanding, I think that functionality can and should live in user-space.
In short, I had checked post 20 out, and while it asked similar questions, I didn't think it gave an answer, or lead towards an answer that I was looking for.
I agree. Is anyone thinking about implementing anything like this in Linux? It seems like as Linux moves to the desktop and to a graphical desktop in particular, bundles are key. Application files could have configuration data attached to the bundle, image files could store previews, and application bindings could be handled in a clear way without obscure registries.
Are GNOME or KDE working on this at all? Could GNUstep support this scheme?
Corporations didn't exist in the US until the civil war, and the Founding Fathers were very opposed to them. The reason they opposed them is the same as the reason people oppose them now: there is no moral system they can be held accountable to. The law applies to them, and gives them rights like citizens, but the ways that they can be punished are limited because they aren't people. Right now it is correct to say that the only votes that count are green, because you can't incarcerate a corporation, or execute it, or make it do community service. Corporations are legal entities, organized as corporations under state laws. They exist as legal entities only, therefore the revolution you suggest is a legal one. Encourage your legal representatives on a national and state level to make laws regulating corporate behavior carry meaningful penalties.
So what do we do? I don't know. I'm tempted to advocate "open revolution" (whatever the fuck that means) at this point, but if you cut the head off a new one will just grow back in its place.
The problem now is that it is impossible to rebel against the corporations themselves. For instance, one cannot buy a car that isn't made by a huge multinational corporation. Most food comes from large agro-businesses, and large companies control most news outlets, computer makers, tv shows, etc. One must inevitably buy from a company that is part of a huge conglomerate.
Most major change of the kind we want isn't initiated by people statedly trying to make a change. Large change comes by accident, not by design (all hail Eris). On that note, we should keep doing what we do well: write free software. "Fate" will take care of the rest, is already starting to in fact :)
Margaret Mead says, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world, indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Free software won't make Nike pay workers a living wage, nor will it keep GE from dumping toxins in your reservoir. A legal revolution will. No matter how great Linux is, it won't make Amazon.com stop trying to patent one-click shopping. Linux will change things, but not those. That change will come from you writing a snail-mail letter to everyone in congress, everyone on the supreme court, and everyone in the White House, telling them that things have to change.
Then write to every candidate for public office and ask them for their position on these reforms. Don't vote for anyone who thinks things are fine. Don't vote for anyone who votes against campaign finance reform, or who is too afraid to answer your questions.
When enough people do that, it's an open revolution.
I wondered about this also, because I've been thinking that a word processor that used pdf as a native format might be really nice. Most people can read pdf files, so it's more portable than ms word, or even PS. Why not have a program that works a little like lyx, but just draws pdf to the screen?
I thought of this because when I'm writing in (La)TeX, I usually have a gv window displaying the file I'm editing. It seems like it ought to be a small step to move from having three windows (emacs, gv, xterm to run for file; do latex $i; dvips $i;done). What's to prevent mixing the emacs part and the gv part.
Rendering the document would be free, since pdf viewing code exists already, and dps is supposed to just let you put ps on a screen. So all that you need is a way to enter text in the file in a WYSIWYG way, and process it easily into PDF or PS.
The processing could be through a tex backend, or something, so you just need to be able to enter the text. How easy would it be to tweak gv to make entering text possible, as a sort of proof of concept?
Wouldn't resealing this document mean instituting prior restraint? This is what the Pentagon Papers were all about, and the Cigarrette papers. In an article in the Nation they talk about a case where the University of California won a suit over documents from a tobacco company because they had published the documents on a CD and the Web. This case should be a precedent that publication on a web site should mean that the documents are public, and not secret.
DeCSS is based on material that was not encrypted, and was available for public scrutiny. At worst, they violated copyright. The supposed trade secret was not a secret because of oversight by licensed users. It strikes me that this case has numerous parallels with the Cigarrette Papers case, which was also in California.
Perhaps a lawyer familiar with the Cigarrette Papers case can tell me why that case did not set precedent.
My cell biology text says that a clone is "a population of organisms derived from a single ancestor and therefore homogeneous." Which is to say, a population in which all individuals have no genetic difference.
Cloning doesn't require that the original cells not be eggs. It is certainly true that the achievement is minor, since it imitates normal biological events that occur when producing identical twins.
What made Dolly neat was that they made a clone from a cell that had differentiated and was therefore in theory incapable of producing anything other than udder cells. Dolly is no more or less a clone than this monkey, and I bet that more monkeys survive this kind of cloning than would if they cloned skin cells.
Since so many monkeys are endangered, it isn't surprising that they want to be able to clone them, and this is cheaper and easier than what they did for Dolly.
Well, they won't be patening the gene itself, however the process by which it is created.
The process of creating a gene is included in the patent(s) for PCR technology, and things like that. The gene patents are (I believe) on uses of a gene. So an antifreeze gene from a fish gets patented as a way to make crops resistant to frost.
In other words, the technology to reproduce and manipulate genes is already patented and has been for some time. This technology is not gene specific, so one wouldn't even file an extension to that original patent as new genes are discovered. What individual genes get patented for is their particular use.
One case I could imagine where I would be wrong would be for DNA primers for PCR.
What PCR does, is it takes a DNA sample, and it unzips the DNA, and special sequences of DNA attach to the part of the DNA you want, and the gene gets copied, unzipped, and copied again. Most gene cloning works like that. I imagine one could patent that primer, which is a small chunk of DNA, but I haven't heard of anyone doing so.
But by splitting the OS from applications, the APIs must open.
Right now they can be closed APIs because the only developers they need are internal. If the only people writing programs are in other companies, then the communication between those companies must be through more open channels. At least they would have to make that collaboration publicly known. Then the government could regulate that interaction, and oblige the companies to offer information equally to all competitors.
Now, MS could transfer one programmer from systems to applications, and with him or her, all of the information on API that the Office team needs to make their program works. Without the government micromanaging the company, there is no way for them to regulate that now.