[sigh] It's not as simple as your Wikipedia one-liner makes it out to be. I will explain this again: ad hominem arguments are not always fallacies; when the aspect of the person being attacked is directly relevant to the argument at hand, then it is quite reasonable to use that in the argument. Here's a simple example -- if someone is being questioned about a friend's possible involvement in a crime, and both the person being questioned and his friend are members of a gang whose members have a history of lying to protect each other, then the cops will treat the results of the questioning much more suspiciously than they would if the people involved had no organized crime record. Certainly this is ad hominem, but are you really going to argue that it's fallacious?
you engaged in ad hominem. Maybe he is a hick; it doesn't affect the validity of his argument, which can be dismissed on other grounds (example: one is science, the other is a belief system.) It's no different than saying "well, that pro-evolution scientist is GAY!
It is different, because Hardison's belief system has a bearing on his own ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning global warming, while your hypothetical gay scientist's sexual preference has no bearing on his ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning evolution. Ad hominem is only a fallacy when the aspect of the person being attacked is irrelevant to the argument at hand.
Unfortunately, it seems that when dealing with religious fanatics, their fanaticism is relevant to every argument -- no matter what the issue is (and from his throwaway line about condoms, it's clear that this guy has plenty of issues) they always filter it through their own version of the One True. To be fair, other kinds of fanatics do this too; how many/. discussions on just about any topic have been hijacked by rants about Microsoft or DRM? It is entirely reasonable to dismiss the arguments made by such people.
a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying)
If there were such a thing, maybe so. But I'd also support a medicine that cured every disease known to man without any side effects. Let me know when you come up with that, okay?
Also, while DRM itself is not necessarily distasteful, the enforcement of IP law, in its current form, really is. The penalties for breaking this ideal DRM scheme of yours (and it would be broken, count on it) should not involve jailing people for distributing CD's or suing folks who have to live in public housing into oblivion. Otherwise, it's just as evil as anything the RIAA/MPAA/BSA are pushing.
You're quite right that ER care is how poor people in America get their health care, even for non-emergency problems. The problem is that it's a dumb way to do things; it ends up costing everyone -- the patients, the hospitals, other patients, and the insurance companies and/or taxpayers who foot the bills -- far more than routine, scheduled care for non-emergency problems. Universal coverage has its own problems, to be sure, but the best evidence from other first-world countries which have comparable health care systems to the US (Canada, Japan, Australia, most of Western Europe) is that the problems of universal coverage, from both a medical and economic point of view, are far less than the problems of the Byzantine patchwork system we have in the US.
Plutonium is heavy. I strongly suspect that the amount of energy needed to launch the stuff into space would far exceed the amount of energy we extracted from it in the first place.
People think it's wonderful how much cool stuff there is out there on the net. Online games are insanely addictive. Major gripes include spam, government regulation and censorship, and how difficult it is to find the information you want. Flamewars over global warming. Seriously, change some of the names (replace Mosaic with Firefox, Nethack with WoW, etc.) and most of what's written here wouldn't raise an eyebrow today. Maybe the only thing that's really changed is that a decade+ ago, these phenomena seemed more worth commenting on.
We must ensure that our scientists are entirely in accord with the Marxist-Leninist principles of eternal socialist brotherhood underlying the glorious people's revolution!
Same shit, different century. And it worked out sooo well the last time.
the US military claims it's harmless and has not trouble using it around civilians in large amounts
Speaking as a Gulf War vet who has seen many of his fellow vets suffer from GWS, and has also observed the stonewalling they've received (first the military denied that the disease existed at all, and when that stopped working, disclaimed any responsibility) I have to say, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
I don't want to think about the cost of 4G of this stuff though. *shiver*
[shrug] A decade ago, I'd never even seen a machine with 4GB RAM, and five years ago, I'd only ever seen that much RAM in monstrously expensive servers. Now I have a machine with that much RAM on my desk. (And yes, I use it; most of my work is pretty heavy number-crunching.) So if this stuff turns out to be viable, it'll get there.
Actually, a better comparison just occurred to me: about fifteen years ago, I paid an extra thousand bucks to get a laptop with a 60MB hard drive (vs. the standard 20MB or whatever it was). A few months ago, I bought a 256MB thumb drive for about twenty-five bucks. That just blew me away when I thought about it.
Well, I was a grunt before I was a medic, and I thought the then-new M16A2 was... okay, but not much more than that, for the temperate-woodland environment in which we were planning to use it. I had switched to medic by the time Desert Storm came around (thank God) but I heard plenty of stories about the A2's jamming in the sand. And most of my patients in the later part of the war were Iraqis, many of whom didn't realize they'd been shot with a 5.56 round until well after the event. We simply should not be using rounds that small; this is not a problem that any improvement in the reliability of the basic M16 design is going to solve.
As far as the M4 goes, I've heard very mixed stories from guys I know who are still in the infantry; they either think it's wonderfully reliable, or they think it's a POS, without much in between. Maybe this has to do with local environmental conditions? But like I said, the size of the round is a problem that's not going away. I know that if I were out there, I'd be a lot happier with an M14 than with any weapon firing 5.56.
And yes, we should do our best to look farther ahead, to ensure that our soldiers (I can't be the only vet who thinks the Army's current insistence on capitalizing "Soldier" is dumb) have the best equipment that our technology can create. But the history of effective infantry weapons, dating back to the days when the Egyptians first organized their troops into ranks and files stepping off "by the left," has pretty much always been one of incremental improvement. Sure, there have been points of revolutionary change -- every few centuries or so: iron spearheads, longbows, muskets, rifles, machine guns. But attempts to stretch the technology of the day beyond its limits have generally ended in baroque failure. And it's the kids at the sharp end who pay the price.
I still wouldn't call it a military boondoggle, because we are engaging most of the enemy (terrorists) in that fight and we have not been attacked on US Soil.
The key mistake in this argument is the assumption that the people we're fighting in Iraq are people who would, if not so occupied, be flying planes into US buildings. Now, some of them probably are, but the best evidence -- given how al-Sadr, bin Laden et al are using the war as a recruiting tool -- is that most of them are people who, before the war, may not have liked the US very much, but didn't actively hate it enough to go out and try to kill Americans; even if those Americans were right next door, not halfway around the world!
Before 9/11, there were plenty of Americans who didn't have any warm'n'fuzzy feelings about the Middle East, but they weren't in any rush to go and enlist to sit out on some chunk of sand in Saudi Arabia either. After 9/11, recruiting stations had lines around the block. If you can't see the parallel here, you're blind.
You want to help the grunt? Okay, invest your money in:
1. Body armor. First, make sure there's enough of the current generation to go around; then put R&D money into developing lighter, better armor that will offer the same level of protection without adding so many pounds to the already killing load the modern-day soldier has to haul around the battlefield.
2. Medevac choppers. Nothing new, nothing fancy, just the same Blackhawks that have been quite successfully pulling wounded troops off the field for the last couple of decades. And, of course, the medics and equipment to turn those choppers into first-class air ambulances. One of the major reasons we lost so few people in Desert Storm (trust me on this one; I was one of the people doing this job) is that we had so much surplus medical capacity in the air that any soldier, injured anywhere in the theatre, combat or non-combat, was guaranteed to be on a chopper within minutes and at a hospital within half an hour. That was the first war in history (and so far, the last) where this was true, and it shows in the casualty reports.
3. A goddamn rifle that works. The M16 and its variants have been failing American soldiers on the battlefield for forty years, for fuck's sake! Either it doesn't shoot at all ("Okay, this thing doesn't work so well in the jungle. So let's make it work really well in the jungle... ooops, now we're fighting in the desert!") or it shoots fine, but its tiny bullets don't make a big enough hole and the enemy keeps coming.
All of the above are a lot cheaper than trying to turn our troops into something out of an anime, you know? And last but certainly not least:
4. The State Department, so maybe we can stop putting our troops into wars we never should have had to fight in the first goddamn place.
Huh, so everyone who wants to send pictures through e-mail is either an "ignorant fuck," a high-school kid, or a "tool?" Ooookay. I'm not sure there's much point in continuing this discussion, but I'll give it another shot.
* The executable ban: another PITA, and one that's occasionally caused me real problems. Is it a good idea generally? Sure, but that's the problem with blanket policies that seem like "generally a good idea" -- when they fail, they fail badly.
* The "no images" option: this is a great idea. Would enough people turn it on to make it useful in stopping the flow of spam? Not a chance. And I guarantee you that any ISP which instituted a blanket ban on images would find itself bleeding customers they way people bleed from a severed artery.
* "Frankly if you can't figure out how..." etc.: Can I figure out how to use Flickr et al.? Sure. Do I want to? No, because their interface sucks. I made my living designing database-driven web applications for seven years, and I can honestly say that by the time I left my last job to return to grad school, I and a team of three other people (count 'em: three) had created a web app that subsumed all the functionality of nearly every DB-driven site I've ever seen (er, with the exception of Google) and looked a hell of a lot better doing it. Making a site for the express purpose of allowing users to post pictures is easy, or at least it ought to be. There is no excuse for the shittiness of sites made for this purpose, or for other single-purpose apps. And there is no reason why I should put myself through the pain of dealing with that shittiness just to send someone a picture of my dog, ferchrissakes.
Destroying functionality is not the answer to the spam problem (or almost any problem, really.) People want the functionality -- that's why it's there in the first place. What we need to do is come up with solutions that work in the existing framework, or they aren't solutions at all.
Spammers have effectively foiled the first strategy -- analyzing the reputation of the sender -- by conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners. Secure Computing, an antispam company in San Jose, Calif., reports that 250,000 new computers are captured and added to these spam "botnets" each day.
Remember, kids, it's not "infected computers," it's "infected Windows computers."
Who's "they," and how exactly is this ban going to be enforced?
If I really want to share pictures I'll put them on a website or Flickr or something.
At which point, we might as well go back to taking pictures on film and sending copies through the mail. [rolls eyes] Practically all the picture-sharing services are an enormous PITA, and not everyone wants to put up every picture they want to show someone on their personal site.
For corporate servers, I agree, the idea of a no-image-attachments policy makes a lot of sense. For personal use, it's not going to happen, nor should it.
I think you misunderstand me -- I'm not arguing at all in favor of Guantanamo-style indefinite imprisonment. What I mean by "the role the intelligence community has to play" is the sort of thing the article talks about, and which spies have traditionally been meant to do: gathering bits of information from a wide variety of sources and putting into a coherent whole to help us either prevent attacks or go after the people who have committed them. I am strongly against intelligence agencies actually hunting people down, precisely because of the abuses that tend to follow.
Investigation, arrest, and dentention are the job of law enforcement. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the like have really sickened people in the FBI and other law enforcement agencies who try to do their duties professionally. I'm all for the sharing of information, but the sharing of responsibilities in this area is clearly a terrible idea.
Prosecution and imprisonment, of course, are the job of the courts; for this reason, and again because of the inevitable abuses if this principle is violated, I'm also strongly opposed to the "military tribunals" and other end-runs around the Constitution that the current administration has brought into being. "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence" -- I see nothing there about these rights applying only to citizens, and as far as I'm concerned, of the prosecutors can't make their case with public evdence, tough luck, let the guy go. The idea of evidence so secret that it can't be released to the defendant and his attorney is bullshit.
The "War on Terror" is a failure on a grand scale, I agree, and one for which we'll be paying the price in blood and treasure for at least a generation to come, probably more. (Cf. "War on Drugs.") This does not mean, however, that we should not try to protect ourselves against murderous fanatics -- we must simply take care that we do not in the process become what we fight.
Carrot and stick. We should, absolutely, do what we can to reduce the root causes of terrorism (which includes things like, oh, say, not invading countries that pose no realistic threat to us at all) in the well-founded hope that such a policy will, in the long run, diminish the threat considerably, if not make it disappear.
But.
The fact of the matter is, right now, there are a fairly large number of people (not all of the Arab or Muslim, by any means) who do hate us enough to do things like flying planes into buildings and planting bombs on subways, and those people are not, however much this sucks, going to change their minds any time soon. We need to be ready and able to defend ourselves against such people -- if possible by stopping their plans before they come to fruition, and if not, by bringing them to justice afterwards. And the intelligence community has a valuable part to play in pursuit of these goals.
But are they GPL'ed? Can I fork one as long as I make available any modifications to the source? 'Cause I'll bet some of those Open Source Analysts are pretty hot.
I most certainly do not want the NSA to have any software at all.
Then realistically, you're going to have to stop developing not only open source software, but any software at all.
This is the flip side of "information wants to be free" -- once it is free, it's really free. Proprietary, open source, whatever; once the bits are out there, they're not going back. Microsoft cannot stop people from using Word to write documents critical of Microsoft, or Visual Studio to develop software that competes with Microsoft's offerings. The NSA cannot stop people from using SE Linux to securely store, process, and transmit information that might be detrimental to the US. China cannot stop its citizens from reading web sites which contain content the government doesn't like; neither can Iran. And you, once you write a piece of software that might somehow be useful to some spook in some three-letter agency, and release that software into the wild, have absolutely no control over what happens afterwards.
And one might call you a bigot, because you are a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion, such as those who choose to be racist. So you are a bigot towards racists. What makes you any better?
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
It is perfectly legitimate to judge people by their actions. You are welcome to believe anything you want about people who are in some way different from you. But the instant you step over the line of treating them differently because of that belief, you have marked yourself as evil. And realistically, there are very damn few racists/sexists/religionists/whatever-ists who can keep themselves from crossing this line.
What makes the anti-racist better than the racist? The same thing that makes the person who kills in self-defense better than the serial killer.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at Pol Pot in Vietnam. He had full control over the lives of many of the citizens of Vietnam and yet he killed millions of them.
I think the Cambodians would be very surprised to learn that Pol Pot killed a bunch of Vietnamese too.
Seriously, if you're going to use historical analogies to bolster your arguments, you should at least try to get the elementary facts right.
[sigh] It's not as simple as your Wikipedia one-liner makes it out to be. I will explain this again: ad hominem arguments are not always fallacies; when the aspect of the person being attacked is directly relevant to the argument at hand, then it is quite reasonable to use that in the argument. Here's a simple example -- if someone is being questioned about a friend's possible involvement in a crime, and both the person being questioned and his friend are members of a gang whose members have a history of lying to protect each other, then the cops will treat the results of the questioning much more suspiciously than they would if the people involved had no organized crime record. Certainly this is ad hominem, but are you really going to argue that it's fallacious?
you engaged in ad hominem. Maybe he is a hick; it doesn't affect the validity of his argument, which can be dismissed on other grounds (example: one is science, the other is a belief system.) It's no different than saying "well, that pro-evolution scientist is GAY!
/. discussions on just about any topic have been hijacked by rants about Microsoft or DRM? It is entirely reasonable to dismiss the arguments made by such people.
It is different, because Hardison's belief system has a bearing on his own ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning global warming, while your hypothetical gay scientist's sexual preference has no bearing on his ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning evolution. Ad hominem is only a fallacy when the aspect of the person being attacked is irrelevant to the argument at hand.
Unfortunately, it seems that when dealing with religious fanatics, their fanaticism is relevant to every argument -- no matter what the issue is (and from his throwaway line about condoms, it's clear that this guy has plenty of issues) they always filter it through their own version of the One True. To be fair, other kinds of fanatics do this too; how many
a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying)
If there were such a thing, maybe so. But I'd also support a medicine that cured every disease known to man without any side effects. Let me know when you come up with that, okay?
Also, while DRM itself is not necessarily distasteful, the enforcement of IP law, in its current form, really is. The penalties for breaking this ideal DRM scheme of yours (and it would be broken, count on it) should not involve jailing people for distributing CD's or suing folks who have to live in public housing into oblivion. Otherwise, it's just as evil as anything the RIAA/MPAA/BSA are pushing.
You're quite right that ER care is how poor people in America get their health care, even for non-emergency problems. The problem is that it's a dumb way to do things; it ends up costing everyone -- the patients, the hospitals, other patients, and the insurance companies and/or taxpayers who foot the bills -- far more than routine, scheduled care for non-emergency problems. Universal coverage has its own problems, to be sure, but the best evidence from other first-world countries which have comparable health care systems to the US (Canada, Japan, Australia, most of Western Europe) is that the problems of universal coverage, from both a medical and economic point of view, are far less than the problems of the Byzantine patchwork system we have in the US.
Plutonium is heavy. I strongly suspect that the amount of energy needed to launch the stuff into space would far exceed the amount of energy we extracted from it in the first place.
People think it's wonderful how much cool stuff there is out there on the net. Online games are insanely addictive. Major gripes include spam, government regulation and censorship, and how difficult it is to find the information you want. Flamewars over global warming. Seriously, change some of the names (replace Mosaic with Firefox, Nethack with WoW, etc.) and most of what's written here wouldn't raise an eyebrow today. Maybe the only thing that's really changed is that a decade+ ago, these phenomena seemed more worth commenting on.
So cure some diabetic mice using this method, then feed those mice to your cat. That should work, right?
We must ensure that our scientists are entirely in accord with the Marxist-Leninist principles of eternal socialist brotherhood underlying the glorious people's revolution!
Same shit, different century. And it worked out sooo well the last time.
I agree with your post overall, but --
the US military claims it's harmless and has not trouble using it around civilians in large amounts
Speaking as a Gulf War vet who has seen many of his fellow vets suffer from GWS, and has also observed the stonewalling they've received (first the military denied that the disease existed at all, and when that stopped working, disclaimed any responsibility) I have to say, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
I don't want to think about the cost of 4G of this stuff though. *shiver*
[shrug] A decade ago, I'd never even seen a machine with 4GB RAM, and five years ago, I'd only ever seen that much RAM in monstrously expensive servers. Now I have a machine with that much RAM on my desk. (And yes, I use it; most of my work is pretty heavy number-crunching.) So if this stuff turns out to be viable, it'll get there.
Actually, a better comparison just occurred to me: about fifteen years ago, I paid an extra thousand bucks to get a laptop with a 60MB hard drive (vs. the standard 20MB or whatever it was). A few months ago, I bought a 256MB thumb drive for about twenty-five bucks. That just blew me away when I thought about it.
Well, I was a grunt before I was a medic, and I thought the then-new M16A2 was ... okay, but not much more than that, for the temperate-woodland environment in which we were planning to use it. I had switched to medic by the time Desert Storm came around (thank God) but I heard plenty of stories about the A2's jamming in the sand. And most of my patients in the later part of the war were Iraqis, many of whom didn't realize they'd been shot with a 5.56 round until well after the event. We simply should not be using rounds that small; this is not a problem that any improvement in the reliability of the basic M16 design is going to solve.
As far as the M4 goes, I've heard very mixed stories from guys I know who are still in the infantry; they either think it's wonderfully reliable, or they think it's a POS, without much in between. Maybe this has to do with local environmental conditions? But like I said, the size of the round is a problem that's not going away. I know that if I were out there, I'd be a lot happier with an M14 than with any weapon firing 5.56.
And yes, we should do our best to look farther ahead, to ensure that our soldiers (I can't be the only vet who thinks the Army's current insistence on capitalizing "Soldier" is dumb) have the best equipment that our technology can create. But the history of effective infantry weapons, dating back to the days when the Egyptians first organized their troops into ranks and files stepping off "by the left," has pretty much always been one of incremental improvement. Sure, there have been points of revolutionary change -- every few centuries or so: iron spearheads, longbows, muskets, rifles, machine guns. But attempts to stretch the technology of the day beyond its limits have generally ended in baroque failure. And it's the kids at the sharp end who pay the price.
Right, because your grand-daddy's rifle is really going to help against tanks and automatic weaponry.
Seems to be working out okay for the Iraqis.
I still wouldn't call it a military boondoggle, because we are engaging most of the enemy (terrorists) in that fight and we have not been attacked on US Soil.
The key mistake in this argument is the assumption that the people we're fighting in Iraq are people who would, if not so occupied, be flying planes into US buildings. Now, some of them probably are, but the best evidence -- given how al-Sadr, bin Laden et al are using the war as a recruiting tool -- is that most of them are people who, before the war, may not have liked the US very much, but didn't actively hate it enough to go out and try to kill Americans; even if those Americans were right next door, not halfway around the world!
Before 9/11, there were plenty of Americans who didn't have any warm'n'fuzzy feelings about the Middle East, but they weren't in any rush to go and enlist to sit out on some chunk of sand in Saudi Arabia either. After 9/11, recruiting stations had lines around the block. If you can't see the parallel here, you're blind.
You want to help the grunt? Okay, invest your money in:
... ooops, now we're fighting in the desert!") or it shoots fine, but its tiny bullets don't make a big enough hole and the enemy keeps coming.
1. Body armor. First, make sure there's enough of the current generation to go around; then put R&D money into developing lighter, better armor that will offer the same level of protection without adding so many pounds to the already killing load the modern-day soldier has to haul around the battlefield.
2. Medevac choppers. Nothing new, nothing fancy, just the same Blackhawks that have been quite successfully pulling wounded troops off the field for the last couple of decades. And, of course, the medics and equipment to turn those choppers into first-class air ambulances. One of the major reasons we lost so few people in Desert Storm (trust me on this one; I was one of the people doing this job) is that we had so much surplus medical capacity in the air that any soldier, injured anywhere in the theatre, combat or non-combat, was guaranteed to be on a chopper within minutes and at a hospital within half an hour. That was the first war in history (and so far, the last) where this was true, and it shows in the casualty reports.
3. A goddamn rifle that works. The M16 and its variants have been failing American soldiers on the battlefield for forty years, for fuck's sake! Either it doesn't shoot at all ("Okay, this thing doesn't work so well in the jungle. So let's make it work really well in the jungle
All of the above are a lot cheaper than trying to turn our troops into something out of an anime, you know? And last but certainly not least:
4. The State Department, so maybe we can stop putting our troops into wars we never should have had to fight in the first goddamn place.
When control of the richest and most powerful country on Earth depends on your Slashdot postings ... let us know.
"You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware."
... yeah, like the switch from paper ballots and/or mechanical voting machines to electronic voting machines in the first place?
Um
Stupidest. Excuse. For. Shilling. For. The. Forces. Of. Evil. EVER.
Huh, so everyone who wants to send pictures through e-mail is either an "ignorant fuck," a high-school kid, or a "tool?" Ooookay. I'm not sure there's much point in continuing this discussion, but I'll give it another shot.
..." etc.: Can I figure out how to use Flickr et al.? Sure. Do I want to? No, because their interface sucks. I made my living designing database-driven web applications for seven years, and I can honestly say that by the time I left my last job to return to grad school, I and a team of three other people (count 'em: three) had created a web app that subsumed all the functionality of nearly every DB-driven site I've ever seen (er, with the exception of Google) and looked a hell of a lot better doing it. Making a site for the express purpose of allowing users to post pictures is easy, or at least it ought to be. There is no excuse for the shittiness of sites made for this purpose, or for other single-purpose apps. And there is no reason why I should put myself through the pain of dealing with that shittiness just to send someone a picture of my dog, ferchrissakes.
* The executable ban: another PITA, and one that's occasionally caused me real problems. Is it a good idea generally? Sure, but that's the problem with blanket policies that seem like "generally a good idea" -- when they fail, they fail badly.
* The "no images" option: this is a great idea. Would enough people turn it on to make it useful in stopping the flow of spam? Not a chance. And I guarantee you that any ISP which instituted a blanket ban on images would find itself bleeding customers they way people bleed from a severed artery.
* "Frankly if you can't figure out how
Destroying functionality is not the answer to the spam problem (or almost any problem, really.) People want the functionality -- that's why it's there in the first place. What we need to do is come up with solutions that work in the existing framework, or they aren't solutions at all.
Spammers have effectively foiled the first strategy -- analyzing the reputation of the sender -- by conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners. Secure Computing, an antispam company in San Jose, Calif., reports that 250,000 new computers are captured and added to these spam "botnets" each day.
Remember, kids, it's not "infected computers," it's "infected Windows computers."
Who's "they," and how exactly is this ban going to be enforced?
If I really want to share pictures I'll put them on a website or Flickr or something.
At which point, we might as well go back to taking pictures on film and sending copies through the mail. [rolls eyes] Practically all the picture-sharing services are an enormous PITA, and not everyone wants to put up every picture they want to show someone on their personal site.
For corporate servers, I agree, the idea of a no-image-attachments policy makes a lot of sense. For personal use, it's not going to happen, nor should it.
I think you misunderstand me -- I'm not arguing at all in favor of Guantanamo-style indefinite imprisonment. What I mean by "the role the intelligence community has to play" is the sort of thing the article talks about, and which spies have traditionally been meant to do: gathering bits of information from a wide variety of sources and putting into a coherent whole to help us either prevent attacks or go after the people who have committed them. I am strongly against intelligence agencies actually hunting people down, precisely because of the abuses that tend to follow.
Investigation, arrest, and dentention are the job of law enforcement. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the like have really sickened people in the FBI and other law enforcement agencies who try to do their duties professionally. I'm all for the sharing of information, but the sharing of responsibilities in this area is clearly a terrible idea.
Prosecution and imprisonment, of course, are the job of the courts; for this reason, and again because of the inevitable abuses if this principle is violated, I'm also strongly opposed to the "military tribunals" and other end-runs around the Constitution that the current administration has brought into being. "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence" -- I see nothing there about these rights applying only to citizens, and as far as I'm concerned, of the prosecutors can't make their case with public evdence, tough luck, let the guy go. The idea of evidence so secret that it can't be released to the defendant and his attorney is bullshit.
The "War on Terror" is a failure on a grand scale, I agree, and one for which we'll be paying the price in blood and treasure for at least a generation to come, probably more. (Cf. "War on Drugs.") This does not mean, however, that we should not try to protect ourselves against murderous fanatics -- we must simply take care that we do not in the process become what we fight.
Carrot and stick. We should, absolutely, do what we can to reduce the root causes of terrorism (which includes things like, oh, say, not invading countries that pose no realistic threat to us at all) in the well-founded hope that such a policy will, in the long run, diminish the threat considerably, if not make it disappear.
But.
The fact of the matter is, right now, there are a fairly large number of people (not all of the Arab or Muslim, by any means) who do hate us enough to do things like flying planes into buildings and planting bombs on subways, and those people are not, however much this sucks, going to change their minds any time soon. We need to be ready and able to defend ourselves against such people -- if possible by stopping their plans before they come to fruition, and if not, by bringing them to justice afterwards. And the intelligence community has a valuable part to play in pursuit of these goals.
But are they GPL'ed? Can I fork one as long as I make available any modifications to the source? 'Cause I'll bet some of those Open Source Analysts are pretty hot.
I most certainly do not want the NSA to have any software at all.
Then realistically, you're going to have to stop developing not only open source software, but any software at all.
This is the flip side of "information wants to be free" -- once it is free, it's really free. Proprietary, open source, whatever; once the bits are out there, they're not going back. Microsoft cannot stop people from using Word to write documents critical of Microsoft, or Visual Studio to develop software that competes with Microsoft's offerings. The NSA cannot stop people from using SE Linux to securely store, process, and transmit information that might be detrimental to the US. China cannot stop its citizens from reading web sites which contain content the government doesn't like; neither can Iran. And you, once you write a piece of software that might somehow be useful to some spook in some three-letter agency, and release that software into the wild, have absolutely no control over what happens afterwards.
And one might call you a bigot, because you are a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion, such as those who choose to be racist. So you are a bigot towards racists. What makes you any better?
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
It is perfectly legitimate to judge people by their actions. You are welcome to believe anything you want about people who are in some way different from you. But the instant you step over the line of treating them differently because of that belief, you have marked yourself as evil. And realistically, there are very damn few racists/sexists/religionists/whatever-ists who can keep themselves from crossing this line.
What makes the anti-racist better than the racist? The same thing that makes the person who kills in self-defense better than the serial killer.